There has long been a miasma of political correctness over ISO 9000 certification – you divert so much effort to auditing your processes that your quality control tends to go down – that we have never taken very much notice of companies trumpeting the news that they have just passed their exams. Now, according to John Seddon, who styles himself the leading critic of ISO 9000 in the UK, the Australian Federal government has concluded that the emperor has no clothes, and, in response to criticism of what it dubs the so-called quality standard, has decreed that ISO 9000 is no longer required for tendering.
