Business Excellence through Information Excellence?:
the TIQM® Quality System 

It has been demonstrated that poor quality data can cause business losses in excess of 20% of revenue and can cause business failure. INFORMATION IMPACT has taken quality principles developed by W. Edwards Deming's (14 points of quality), Masaki Imai (Kaizen), Joseph Juran (Quality Planning), Philip Crosby (Quality is Free) and Quality Function Deployment, and combined them into a full methodology of Information Quality Improvement called the TIQM® Quality System.

Quality is no longer an optional characteristic of an organization's products and services. It is a fundamental requirement. Information quality is no longer an optional characteristic of information systems. Information quality is a requirement for effective business performance.

INFORMATION IMPACT helps you implement an information quality environment to measure and improve the quality of information within the business. We address the systemic, political and organizational factors as well as the statistical quality control factors of quality information.

The TIQM Quality System is not a program. It is a mindset of customer service in information products and a habit of continuous process improvement of two kinds of processes:

• Development processes that define data and define and develop applications
• Business processes that create/update/delete data and retrieve/present information through integration of quality management beliefs, principles and methods into the culture of the enterprise.

We help you at many different levels based on your specific needs:

• Conduct an information quality maturity assessment and gap analysis, including:
  • Analysis of your organization's maturity capability for information quality improvement
  • Gap analysis based on your strategic objectives for information quality management
  • Identification of "red flag" problems requiring immediate attention
  • Written report and presentation on findings, recommendations and next steps
• Develop a plan with you for implementing an effective information quality environment or reviewing your plan, including:
  • Defining the vision and mission for information quality
  • Defining information quality roles and responsibilities and information stewardship roles and responsibilities
  • Defining key processes for information quality management
• Develop and customize a methodology of information quality improvement processes tailored for your organization
• Evaluate and select Information Quality products
• Provide executive, business and information systems presentations on:
  • Business costs of information quality principles
  • Management principles of information quality
  • Business and systems accountabilities (stewardship) for information quality
  • Processes and cultural ingredients for information quality
• Plan and conduct a data definition and information architecture assessment to measure metadata quality
• Plan and conduct an information quality assessment to measure information quality and identify information quality problems
• Plan and implement data cleansing/transformation processes for data warehouse or data conversion
• Measure and quantify the costs of poor information quality
• Implement processes, information stewardship, and management techniques for continuous information quality improvement
• Facilitate information quality process improvement workshops to identify information quality problem root cause and plan process improvements to eliminate information quality problems

If you have an existing Information Quality program or Data Warehouse cleansing and transformation program, we can help you achieve greater business benefits with our High IQ^TM (Information Quality) review and improvement service.

Note about the history of TIQM: 

TIQM was originally known as TQdM (Total Quality data Management).  Larry English coined the term in 1993 when he began applying the work of Deming, Juran, Imai and other quality management gurus to information.  TQdM was originally used in Commerce when Mr. English taught his first seminars on Total Quality data Management in 1994.  INFORMATION IMPACT International Inc. registered the Copyrights to TQdM in 1995 and Larry wrote his groundbreaking book using his TQdM methodology in 1999. 

On or about 2001 Mr. English determined that when he spoke to executives they were more in tune to his message when he used the term ?information? rather than ?data.?  They saw data as more of a ?clerical? term, or a ?technical? term.  But they needed ?information? to manage their business.  Business people also reacted better to the term ?information? than to ?data.?  So TQdM evolved into The TIQM Quality System as it is known today.  However, many of Mr. English?s early clients still use the term TQdM to refer to their information quality function and processes.