What The ISO Survey, 14th Cycle Should Tell Us
by Christopher Paris
In the coming months, ISO will be releasing The ISO Survey of ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 Certificates, 14th Cycle, the latest annual report on the state of ISO 9001 throughout the world. Using data culled from registrars, the ISO Survey reports on the total certificates worldwide, and then analyzes them by geographic region, industry and other criteria.
As we've reported here since 2003*, the ISO Survey is a flawed document polluted by political spin and aggressive editing intended to save face for ISO in the wake of a dramatic decline in ISO 9001 acceptance. Will we see a different tack with the upcoming report?
Unlikely. Despite our very noisy (and popular) calls to ISO for an improvement in the ISO Survey reporting, there appears to be no intent to do so. In last year's report, ISO took the extraordinary step of refusing to report on one of the most important, if damning, statistics: the number of certificates withdrawn or lost each year. Without this data, the health of ISO 9001 as a standard and certification scheme cannot be truly measured, and the ISO Survey becomes nothing but a PR fluff piece aimed at making the ISO leadership look good.
Bad Data = Room for Spin
ISO makes great hay of the fact that its data is flawed or inadequate. However, this has never stopped ISO editor Roger Frost and ISO General Secretary Alan Bryden from using the data to loudly pronounce the success of ISO 9001 as a standard, and of ISO in general. ISO has the authority -- if it chose to exercise it -- to ensure that organizations such as the IAF and CASCO forced registrars to maintain accurate certificate data and report it annually. This is not difficult stuff. But in doing so, ISO would lose a key escape clause that allows it to dismiss data that reflects poorly on it.
It's safe to say we will not be seeing accurate data in the upcoming 14th Cycle report. Withdrawals and growth rates will not be reported, and only an analysis of total certificates will be performed. Any decrease will be explained away under the unverifiable theories of "certificate merging" and "proliferation of sector standards." Just wait.
So what would the real data look like, if we assume the trends from recent years held out? Let's see:
[graphic here]
The chart above shows that had ISO reported withdrawals in last year's report, the overall net gain would not have been a gain at all, but the first year that there was a net loss for certificates. This assumes -- again, we have to assume certain factors, since Frost broke an 11-year tradition and stopped reporting withdrawals -- that the withdrawal rate recorded in 2001 and 2002 remained constant at about 3%. Because the increase for 2003 was only 1.1%, the lowest in the standard's history, there would have been a net loss of about 10,799 certificates.
It is likely that some of these were the result of a trend towards certificate consolidation: where a company that had multiple certificates for different sites decides to merge these into one company-wide certificate. That this phenomenon would account for almost 11,000 certificates -- more than 2% of all known certified organizations -- seems unlikely. But without firm data, we will never know. ISO is very comfortable remaining in that foggy haze, for obvious reasons.
Assuming that the withdrawal rate remains the same, and accounting for a much-predicted and widely reported expectation of an additional 5% drop-off rate due to companies that did not transition to ISO 9001:2000 by the deadline of December '03, then the numbers for 2004 will be even worse, dipping to a remarkable net loss of almost 17,000 certificates in a single year.
Our Oxebridge calculations then predict a regaining of certificates by 2005 and 2006, although at such a snail's pace as to be almost negligible as a metric of ISO 9001's popularity.
The next chart shows the history of total certificates, the only number that ISO has consistently reported every year, but predicts the data for 2003 through 2006. Even if ISO continues to stick to reporting of raw totals, the numbers should be damning. It will be interesting to see how Frost et al spin this in a way that does not reflect poorly on the standard or ISO itself.
[graphic here]
Breaking the Code... of Ethics
This failure to report accurately in the ISO Survey each year is clearly a violation of ISO's own much-publicized "Code of Ethics." For the full document, click here, but let's take a look at the specific areas in which Bryden -- who authorizes the ISO Survey report -- is personally rattling his organization's ethical compass. (Emphasis added.)
ISO members are committed to developing globally relevant International Standards by... ensuring fair and responsive application of the principles of due process, transparency, openness, impartiality and voluntary nature of standardization by...organizing national input in a timely and effective manner, taking into account all relevant interests at national level.
By refusing to accurately report the ISO 9001 certificate data, ISO is breaking its own Code of Ethics and avoiding transparency, openness and impartiality. By claiming it is unable to gather accurate data, ISO is breaking its requirements that it organize national input effectively.
Let's continue:
ISO parties are committed to...preventing conflicts of interest by communicating in a fair and transparent manner to interested parties when work on new standards is initiated and subsequently on the progress of their development, ensuring that market needs are the driver for development of standards.
Again, the ISO Survey is hardly fair and transparent. By reporting flawed data rife with editorial opinion, it cannot be considered any kind of accurate report on the "progress of the devleopment" of 9001 or 14001, and it certainly fails in providing any metric of market needs. If that were the case, ISO might conside abandoning ISO 9001 altogether, given the dismal uptake rate; instead, it spins the data to boast about the popularity of ISO 9001!
How to Fix Everything in Four Easy Steps
As I have said for the past few years, what must happen is a series of simple, ISO-sponsored measures:
* ISO must start reporting the data using growth rates, not just totals
* ISO must resume the reporting of withdrawal rates
* ISO must, through CASCO (the ISO organization that develops the rules for accreditation bodies and registrars) require that registrars submit annual reports on certificates for the purpose of data analysis, or be de-accredited
* ISO must publish the raw data without editorializing.
ISO 9001 is important for more reasons than just certification. But certification allows us to measure the uptake rate. It is also a violation of trust and the ISO Code of Ethics to allow the standard's value to plummet when so many companies have invested time and money in its implementation and certification.
Only with true, hard data can the world begin to analyze if ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 are succeeding in their attempts to ease trade and improve companies' operations. Only with a "warts and all" examination can we know the weakness of the standard and its deployment, and work to correct those for the benefit of the entire world.
To see graphics associated with this article, go directly to http://www.oxebridge.com/news.asp?ID=267 .
[Christopher Paris is VP Operations of Oxebridge Quality Resources, a Senior ASQ Member and a voting member of the US TAG to TC 176.]
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