This paper summarizes activities and results from the quality assessment project ITQ, “Quality certification of IT support at work”, which was performed by Swedish researchers in close co-operation with trade unions in 1999-2002. The ITQ project is part of a network, UsersAward, which continues to work for the goal to develop and maintain a strategy for good software products on the work floor ...

Theory suggests that certification with a management standard may reduce information asymmetries in supply chains and thereby generate a competitive advantage for certified firms. This article uses an 11-year panel of U.S. manufacturing facilities to test whether certification with the ISO 9000 Quality Management Standard generates a competitive advantage. Results suggest that certified facilit...

B oard certification has been widely accepted as a means of improving the quality of medical and dental care. Yet, certification of most practicing orthodontists has historically remained elusive at best. Traditional certification percentages of American Association of Orthodontists (AAO) members before 2005 did not exceed 25% and was only between 13% and 17% in the late 1970s. In 2005, to moti...

Non-financial auditing and third-party certification of management systems (such as the ISO 9000 quality management system) is becoming a pervasive activity amongst an increasing number of firms and their supply chains. Though the literature has paid substantial attention to adopting firms, there has been little focus on the interrelationship between third-party certifiers and adopting firms. B...

In this paper we present a complete reference framework for the operation of Certification Service Provider as an organisation. The objective is to form an intermediate reference model, to which the CSPs will conform, towards the full compliance to the ISO-9000 quality standards. There are two dimensions of quality in respect of a CSP: The first quality dimension regards the value added securit...

The Common Criteria (CC) certification framework defines a widely recognized, multi-domain certification scheme that aims to provide security assurances about IT products to consumers. However, the CC scheme does not prescribe a monitoring scheme for the CC practice, raising concerns about the quality of the security assurance provided by the certification and questions on its usefulness. In th...

Since the incorporation of the American Board of Proctology, development and refinement of the process of board certification has been a critical part of the establishment and growth of the specialty of colon and rectal surgery. Continued commitment to the process begun by the early pioneers of this field provides quality practitioners not only when initially trained, but increasingly throughou...