Developing Quality Management Systems with DEMO

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has defined Quality Management, but it has not yet adopted standards for developing Quality Management Systems (QMSs), notably not for modeling business processes in this context. Consequently a variety of modeling techniques are in use. Most of these are not able to produce concise and comprehensive models, whereas these features are particularly important for QMSs. Moreover, these techniques appear to be based on the mechanistic paradigm, meaning that they are task oriented instead of human oriented. Various researches indicate that this leads, among other things, to alienating employees from their work. DEMO (Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations) has both desirable features: it is human oriented and it produces concise and comprehensive models of business processes, since it is based on the systemic notion of enterprise ontology. This paper reports on the theoretical evaluation of DEMO for the purpose of developing QMSs, as well as on practical experiences in applying DEMO to it.