Autor: Michael Reiss

State-of-the-art risk assessments either overestimate or underestimate both probability and impact of quality risks. Misleading assessments can be avoided by modeling quality risks as conflicts instead of defects. Refocusing requires a transition from production approaches to interaction approaches covering several clusters of relevant actors in quality management. Customer involvement e.g. as a co-producer not only supports customer satisfaction and retention but also reduces producers’ costs since risk identification becomes more valid and risk sharing is enabled.

Although all approaches to proactive change management of production systems emphasize the relevance of complexity, an integrated building block “management of complexity” is not available. Based on a specification of the domains and dimensions of production complexity a framework for handling complexity is outlined. It covers guidelines, principles and tools for coping with the multiplicity, diversity, ambiguity and dynamics of production systems.

Over the last two decades quality management has been shaped by a plethora of concepts for performance-focused quality design, ranging from six sigma, TQM, EFQM, Sustainable Quality Management to ISO 9000- certification and the Kano model. None of these mainstream models fully meets the requirements of navigation capacity, viability and balance. The balanced resilience concept provides a realistic approach for an integrated management of quality risks and opportunities. Establishing barriers to failure and dismantling barriers to success serve as key elements of the concept.

The concept enterprise 2.0 stands for the enabling of new forms of know-ledge management by utilizing internet technology. While web 2.0 focuses on tools for communication, relationship management and learning, i.e. weblogs, wikis, and social networking platforms, enterprise 2.0 also covers the strategy, structure, and culture of knowledge management, and thus encompasses the entire enterprise. The authors argue that the vision of a blended enterprise is superior to existing non-hybrid enterprise 2.0-visions in terms of both feasibility and performance.

For practitioners and researchers in the field of organizational networks virtual structures are of paramount importance. However the issue of purity of these virtual structures has not been sufficiently dealt with. The dissemination of hybrid forms of learning („blended learning“), of distribution („brick & click“) and work (“split location work”) signals that virtual organizational structures are also based on a hybrid design. This article outlines the variety of architectures of such semi-virtual structures as well as the challenges related to their implementation.