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Examines how a TQM system can improve the software engineering process, evolving from traditional quality management systems to TQM with process measurement and improvement. Offers a framework around which a software process can be seen to mature, details the requirements of ISO 9001 and suggests that the traditional quality guidelines can be redefined to take account of TQM and its focus on process measurement and process improvement.

Boisot’s I‐space is used as a framework to explain the comparative success of computer‐based tools in information scanning and dissemi‐ nation, and the failure to support problem areas in the process of knowledge creation, especially where this involves interactions within user groups. Recent research indicates that process‐based studies are likely to be productive, and that there is a useful overlap between information science and computer science interests and methods.

Argues that it can be very difficult for someone coming to an organization, with the job of designing or modelling some or all of its processes, to know how to cut the mass of organizational activity up into component processes and to see how they are related; in other words, to determine the process architecture of the organization. Calls for a partitioning into processes, that as far as possible, completely aligned to the business in which the organization is in and as independent as possible of how the business chooses to organize itself. Describes an approach to solving the problem.