Using Enterprise Reference Models for Automated ISO 9000 Compliance Evaluation

A computational enterprise model representing key facets of an organization can be an effective tool to consider when planning an enterprise information architecture. For example, a specific organization's quality management business processes and organizational structures can be represented using such a model, and then compared to a reference model of "good" processes and structures, such as the ISO 9000 standards. The specific and reference models can be represented using common entities, attributes, and relationships— comprising general schema or data model—which are then formally defined and constrained. These definitions and constraints can be used as inference rules applied to the models. Hence identification of differences between the models as quality problems can be automatically inferred, as can the analysis and correction of problems. In this paper, the TOVE ISO 9000 Micro-Theory is presented as a formal reference model of quality goodness. ISO 9000 requirements represented as inference rules in the microtheory are applied to facts about an organization's quality management processes and structures, and conformance or nonconformance to requirements is automatically inferred. TOVE Ontologies for Quality Modeling are the common data and logical (formal definitions and constraints) models of the reference and specific organization's models. The example use of the microtheory demonstrates enterprise model use for a pre-audit, which lowers the cost and time for improving quality through achieving ISO 9000 compliance. Since these enterprise models are constructed using ontologies, benefits of using ontologies such as model re-usability and sharability can be reaped.