I got some good news a couple of weeks ago. I have been invited to speak at the IRCA 2010 Conference in Yokohama in June. I’ll also be running some workshops on the days preceding this event, which I’ll make sure are good fun. Getting involved with this event is a great honour for me and also a great opportunity. They’re interested in my views on quality in the 21st century, and its impact on the traditional view of 3rd party auditing, and they want me to develop this theme for the event

Third party quality auditing has a few weaknesses and a somewhat tarnished image. There’s a teeny financial conflict of interest in the mix, standards can be applied in a very elastic way and auditing can have a compliance-heavy bias, without taking a more “overall view”. As things are, few people would see something like ISO 9001 certification as any sort of guarantee we’ll get great service. For years you could say we’ve needed a people’s champion with real teeth, finally I think we’re starting to get just that

I’ve noticed how effective the use of social media such as YouTube and Twitter are becoming as guerilla agents for standards. These outlets are being increasingly used to “out” examples of poor service, and things can go viral pretty quickly. I think this is great. It gives the customer a direct voice and it should help to keep companies on their toes as, like the Spanish Inquisition, it can pounce at any time. Power to the people, you might say. It works a different way to certification, for sure, but in its own way I can see how it could help people make the right choice by giving them some useful information. Is it fair on companies? Who knows. There are many that would argue that if you have nothing to hide, then you’ll have nothing to fear

To illustrate the point, here’s a video clip from YouTube that was originally posted by Maria Palma at People2People Service. This is exactly the type of thing I’m talking about. In this case it is Comcast that gets the red face (you’d hope)