Given all the campaigning by Barack Obama and John McCain, including the many promises they’re making that I believe won’t be kept, I recall my own predictions and visionary assurances a decade ago concerning the quality profession in the 21st century. When I was asked during the mid-1990s, “How do you see the quality profession changing to meet the needs of the 21st century?”, this is how I responded:

“The quality assurance function will give way to a new, comprehensive, value-added function that will be called “systems assurance.” This new function will provide a second-party review of how well the systems within the total organization are functioning and will evaluate their effect on all of the organization’s stakeholders, not just its external customers. The systems assurance function will audit product, quality management, environmental management, security management, financial management, strategic management, safety management, customer acquisition, and other general management systems. This new function will focus more on the marketing and sales systems than on production systems because marketing and sales will have a greater effect on customer satisfaction than production. It will be responsible for auditing compliance to the present-defined systems and identifying system- improvement opportunities that will increase the total organization’s performance as viewed by all its stakeholders.

 …