Hi again. Heaven only knows how many systems did saves and restores over the last few weekends, so I hope everyone out there had a safe and happy holiday season. Traditionally, the end of the old year and the beginning of the new are a time of introspection and review. A time to reflect on the greater and the lesser successes of the last year.

The greater successes are the ones we brag about until our bored friends threaten to stuff leftover Christmas wrapping in our mouths. Effects on our friends aside, it often pays to analyze these positive events to see what they can teach us about formalizing success. The more we understand why we were successful, the more we can expect to reproduce it.

The lesser successes on the other hand are the problems we have dealt with over the year that would look completely different if we got a second chance. These usually become the basis of our New Year's resolutions. You know the kind - I'll never again smoke (at least not when I'm gassing up the lawnmower!), I won't ever try to outrun the highway patrol again, I won't attempt a restore without two full saves, etc. The two most common threads are "I won't do xxx again", and a few weeks later "What resolutions?". These areas also deserve a serious review but because they rarely get it, tend to reoccur year after year. I firmly believe the old saw about "no such thing as a failure, only those who refuse to learn from their mistakes".

By now you've deduced that either I'm becoming a journal-vangelist (newspaper preacher), or I'm not really talking about our personal lives. Fortunately for all of us, it's the latter. This is the last column on motivating you to get a move on and engineer some quality in your professional life and data processing systems. To complete the thought above, too many shops and too many professionals don't make the necessary effort to understand the past. Some of you (especially in the MultiValue community) have created wonderfully successful systems. A significant number of these (especially in the Pick community) were pure luck. To reproduce successes you need to understand them. To avoid reproducing negative learning experiences you need to understand them also.

I know money is tight, and in this economy no MIS department has people to spare. I know, when you have just escaped blame for the latest "oops", the last thing you want to do is volunteer to find out what went wrong, but believe me, this is the crux of quality management -- budget enough time and energy to critically review the last system. The thought "I firmly resolve never to write a bad system again" is just a smoke screen if it isn't followed by the effort to understand what made the last system good or bad, robust or buggy, high performance or unusably slow, exactly what you customers (end users) wanted or 'the system from hell'.

Once the organization has this knowledge of what went right and wrong, formalize it. Take the time to document the things that worked well for you and fix the source of the problems. If your organization is fixing system problems without thinking about where they were introduced into the process, it's like continually adding water to a pool instead of fixing the leaks. You'll find you make much greater headway by fixing the structural problems, and in the process may avert a future disaster.

Well, the soapbox is getting a little wobbly, so let me leave you with some last bits of encouragement. You don't have to go it alone. There are lots of interesting resources open to organizations who desire to take the next step in pursuing quality improvement programs. If you are interested in the formal side, many colleges around the country have short classes in many aspects of quality management and in particular ISO 9000 certification. Many of the large auditing firms have consulting services and/or check-lists specifically for MIS installations. Your hardware and software vendors are another likely source of reasonable help. In fact, any outside consultant can often provide unique insights. Because they are not tied to the status quo, they approach problems from a different side -- always ask if they see anything you don't. There are also a number of eminently readable books on 'where to start' such as the one mentioned in the last column.

And the most valuable but perhaps the most overlooked resource of all are the people who live with the quality issues day in and day out. Given the right forum, you might be astonished at the level of understanding and common sense ideas available from your customers and employees. No matter how large or small your company, if you are sincere, they'll love you for asking. Start today.