According to W. Edwards Deming, American companies require nothing less than a transformation of management style and of governmental relations with industry. In Out of the Crisis, originally published in 1982, Deming offers a theory of management based on his famous 14 Points for Management. Management's failure to plan for the future, he claims, brings about loss of market, which brings about loss of jobs. Management must be judged not only by the quarterly dividend, but by innovative plans to stay in business, protect investment, ensure future dividends, and provide more jobs through improved product and service. In simple, direct language, he explains the principles of management transformation and how to apply them.

Out of the Crisis

How has Japan become a major economic power, a world leader in the automotive and electronics industries? What is the secret of their success? The consensus has been that, though the Japanese are not particularly innovative, they are exceptionally skilful at imitation, at improving products that already exist. But now two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hiro Takeuchi, turn this conventional wisdom on its head: Japanese firms are successful, they contend, precisely because they are innovative, because they create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. Examining case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, 3M, GE, and the U.S. Marines, this book reveals how Japanese companies translate tacit to explicit knowledge and use it to produce new processes, products, and services.

The knowledge-creating company : how Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation

Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product.

An international standard has now been established for evaluating the quality of software products. However there is no equivalent standard for evaluating the quality of conceptual models. While a range of quality frameworks have been proposed in the literature, none of these have been widely accepted in practice and none has emerged as a potential standard. As a result, conceptual models continue to be evaluated in practice in an ad hoc way, based on common sense, subjective opinions and experience. For conceptual modelling to progress from an "art" to an engineering discipline, quality standards need to be defined, agreed and applied in practice. This paper conducts a review of research in conceptual model quality and identifies the major theoretical and practical issues which need to be addressed. We consider how conceptual model quality frameworks can be structured, how they can be developed, how they can be empirically validated and how to achieve acceptance in practice. We argue that the current proliferation of quality frameworks is counterproductive to the progress of the field, and that researchers and practitioners should work together to establish a common standard (or standards) for conceptual model quality. Finally, we describe some initial efforts towards developing a common standard for data model quality, which may provide a model for future standardisation efforts.

Theoretical and practical issues in evaluating the quality of conceptual models: current state and future directions

User Centered Design

This exploratory research investigates the evaluation process of conceptual specifications developed using either Extended Entity-Relationship (EER) or Unified Modeling Language (UML) conceptual models. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive framework for evaluating EER and UML conceptual schemas. Furthermore, we define classes of metrics facilitating the evaluation process and leading to the choice of the appropriate representation among several schemas describing the same reality. Based on quality criteria proposed in the literature, we select a subset of criteria relevant to conceptual EER schema quality evaluation. For each criterion we define one or several metrics allowing the designer to measure the schema quality. We evaluate alternative EER conceptual schemas representing the same universe of discourse using the appropriate criteria and their associated metrics. Finally, we extrapolate this evaluation process to UML schemas. Following the development of our framework, we analyze a case study and provide evidence in the support of the usefulness of the framework.

Conceptual Modeling quality - from EER to UML schemas evaluation

Conceptual Modeling Quality - From EER to UML Schemas Evaluation

Advances in Conceptual Modeling - Foundations and Applications

A data warehouse is a database focused on decision making. Decision makers typically access data warehouses through OLAP tools, based on a multidimensional representation of data. In the past, the key issue of data warehouse quality has often been centered on data quality. However, since OLAP tool users directly access multidimensional schemas, multidimensional schema quality evaluation is also crucial. This paper focuses on the quality of multidimensional schemas, more specifically on the analyzability and simplicity criteria. We present the underlying multidimensional model and address the problem of measuring and finding the right balance between analyzability and simplicity of multidimensional schemas. Analyzability and simplicity are assessed using quality metrics which are described and illustrated based on a case study. The main objective of our approach is to provide the data warehouse designer with precise measures to support him in the choice among several alternative multidimensional schemas.

Samira Si-Said Cherfi

Papers

Conceptual Modeling quality - from EER to UML schemas evaluation

Conceptual Modeling Quality - From EER to UML Schemas Evaluation

Advances in Conceptual Modeling - Foundations and Applications

Multidimensional Schemas Quality: Assessing and Balancing Analyzability and Simplicity

Advances in Conceptual Modeling - Theory and Practice