Two Decades of ISO 9001
Celebrating the past; looking towards the future


The ISO 9001 quality management standard this year marks its 20th anniversary. In this interview with ISO Secretary-General Alan Bryden, IQNet asks why the standard has been so successful, and how ISO will meet future challenges.

ISO 9001 is the world’s most widely adopted framework for business management systems. What has made the ISO 9000 series so popular, particularly in the service industry?

We are now up to the third edition of ISO 9001, and at the end of 2006, we were close to 900 000 certifications in 170 countries. This is a clear indication that the standard has been broadly and successfully implemented.

From its beginning in 1987, ISO 9000 has been a child of globalisation. It’s about having an international benchmark for the implementation of quality assurance and for managing supplier-customer relationships worldwide, because there had been a proliferation of quality assurance standards in the defence industry, in aeronautics, automobile industries and in other fields.

ISO 9001 is successful because it helps suppliers and customers alike to take advantage of the astonishing growth in global trade that we have seen in the last two decades.

“ISO 9001 is successful because it helps suppliers and customers alike to take advantage of the astonishing growth in global trade.”

Even so, the overall global growth rate in certifications to ISO 9001 appears to be slowing, especially in developed countries. What are the main criticisms of the standard, and how are you addressing them?

ISO 9001 has been criticised – not unfairly – for imposing a somewhat rigid administrative burden and unnecessary paperwork, but I believe we have improved in that regard over the three versions. The 2000 version, with the process approach and the human resources dimension, is more closely aligned with the practices of industry.
This version was tested by thousands of companies and organizations and has since proved its broad applicability. A measure of that is the very important implementation of ISO 9001 in service industries (more than 30 % of certificates), where the human resources approach is particularly applicable. The quality of services is very dependent on the qualifications and motivation of the people providing them.

It’s very difficult for us to analyse whether we’re seeing a real decrease in certification in developed countries. Our 2005 survey of certification did show a decrease in the UK, which is of course the home of BS 7750, one of the ancestors of ISO 9000. But you have to take into account that certification activities are being optimised for multi-site certification, and we count certificates, not sites. As the survey evolves, we are trying to count sites. Our 2006 survey shows an overall increase of +16 % of ISO 9001: 2000 certificates worldwide.

Another aspect that should be taken into account is the fact that the manufacturing industry, which represents about 70 per cent of the number of certificates, has undergone a significant process of de-localisation, from developed countries to emerging economies.

A third aspect is that some companies see ISO 9001 as a good standard to structure their corporate systems, but may feel that certification is not necessary because they enjoy sufficient confidence in the marketplace and don’t need third-party certification.

Steady growth for IQNet partners

IQNet partners continue to report overall growth in certifications issued, reaching around 250,000 ISO 9001 certificates worldwide. Through its international network of national registrars, IQNet is the preferred provider for worldwide certification services and assessment. The network includes a comprehensive range of global resources and capabilities, employing more than 10,000 auditors. More than 40 accreditation bodies recognise IQNet certification. IQNet partners serve in virtually all business and social sectors. With more than 150,000 certified organisations around the world, the network provides customers a wide variety of innovative services, including excellence assessments, training courses, NetAudit and more.


Over the last five years or so, there has been a proliferation of specialist and sector-specific management system standards. What are the driving forces behind this shift?

That’s true, especially for ISO 9001. Within ISO, we’re seeing this elaboration (rather than proliferation!) in sectors such as automobiles, oil and gas, and medical devices. Outside ISO there are sector-specific standards emerging in areas where the customer-supplier relationship is particularly close, for instance where just-in-time delivery is crucial. We’re seeing these standards in sectors like telecommunications, aerospace and railways. But I would emphasise that ISO 9001: 2000 is still recognised as the core element of these sector-specific management systems and therefore provides a common platform on which to build quality systems.

IQNet and the challenge of sector-specific standards

IQNet is well placed to add value with a growing range of industry-specific solutions that avoid the burden of increased development costs. This challenge has been successfully addressed by establishing the IQNet Ltd division - a global certification body.

IQNet Ltd is able to develop new assurance products and gain accreditation and/or recognition for these products; assessment services for which are then delivered through 37 partners on a globally consistent basis. This avoids having to “reinvent the wheel” 37 times, saving a multitude of development and accreditation costs. A recent example is IQNet Ltd’s recent global accreditation of the SA8000 (Social Accountability) program.


Is it a concern for ISO that these external, sector-specific standards are being developed?

Objective 6 of the ISO strategic plan specifies that we wish to be seen as the neutral provider of the standards to support conformity assessment activities. ISO does not explicitly support third-party intervention. We support first, second or third-party assessment, and we simply provide the market with the standards including those for conducting and evaluating conformity assessment activities. ISO does not get involved in assessment of compliance to its standards. This is very important for our relationships with industry; we cannot be seen as developing standards for the sake of increasing the certification business.

But still, the certification industry is essential here. And through CASCO [ISO’s Committee on Conformity Assessment], you basically create the standards for our industry. Looking into the ISO “crystal ball”, how do you view the trend in certification needs for future generations of ISO standards? Will third-party assessment and certification continue to provide assurance in the same way or will we see more standards “not intended for certification”?

The first motivation for developing a management system standard in any given theme or sector is to crystallise the best practices recognised by the profession in question and to create a document which facilitates the implementation and recognition of these good practices in an organisation.

It is indeed important to also help the organisation communicate its positive steps to the outside world, either through certification or through self-evaluation of its compliance. In some cases, companies that are not sufficiently known in the marketplace find it advantageous to seek third-party certification. But the first job of a standard is to compile best practices. Certification is the cherry on the pie.

Certification can increase stakeholder confidence to an organisation’s systems and behaviour but is also used for internal motivation. The job of the IQNet members and other certification and assessment companies is to add value by coming in as a third party and independently assessing compliance. Demonstrating that third-party intervention adds value is your job, not ISO’s. CASCO comes into the picture because the market asks: ‘How do I recognise somebody likely to provide me good third-party assessment services?’ We need benchmarks and international standards relating to these activities, and we need mutual recognition so we can reduce the number of certifications and tests that companies have to do. This is why CASCO has become so important in the past 10 years: because of the impact of conformity assessment on trade, and because of the emergence of management systems which lend themselves to third-party intervention.

“The first motivation for developing a management system standard in any given sector is to crystallise best practices.”

The proliferation of specialist certification services represents both an opportunity and a challenge for certification bodies, which are being asked to provide a growing number of assurance solutions for their clients. The opportunity is that the growing range of assessment and certification services allows certification bodies to offer focused solutions to their customers. However, this trend also increases product development costs for certification bodies. Sector-specific schemes are usually narrow in application and not likely to guarantee the return on investment possible with generic schemes such as ISO 9001. How is ISO addressing these issues?

We have two main concerns: One is coherence, and we see a reasonable coherence around ISO 9001 requirements. They are the core, and from there you can expand, elaborate and sometimes add requirements. By having systematic references to ISO 9001, we are confident that sector-specific standards can maintain coherence.

Our second concern is to avoid the proliferation of thematic management systems multiplying in an inconsistent way. We have made sure that some recent developments on themes like environmental management with ISO 14001, IT security with ISO/IEC 27001, supply chain security with ISO 28000, and food safety with ISO 22000 are indeed coherent and based on the same framework. We need to explain how to integrate various management systems, and we have an ISO document under development to give guidance on this integration and on training for our members and certification bodies. We owe it to our users, who may be working to comply with several standards.

Do you see a need to integrate these various standards?

Well, that is still a subject for debate. We have created a strategic advisory group on management systems, working under our Technical Management Board. We conducted a survey of CEOs in various countries, asking if they felt that we should aim for a holistic ISO management standard covering everything. We got mixed answers, frankly, even to the question of whether we should integrate ISO 9001 and ISO 14001.

The market is not really asking for super-integration; the market is asking for coherence. There should at least be a menu, so you can decide which aspect of management you want to highlight through a management system. If you select environment or security and you already have an overarching ISO 9001 quality standard in place, you want to be able to implement the other standards without running into problems comparing or understanding them. There should not be different requirements for documentation, archiving, process management or anything else.

We are progressively working for more coherence among standards, and that is the idea behind the revision of ISO 14001 in 2004 and revisions of other standards.

The market is not really asking for super-integration; the market is asking for coherence.




Mr Roger Frost, Manager, Communication Services Mr René Wasmer, IQNet President Alan Bryden, ISO Secretary – General Mr Antonio (Tony) Di Palma, Managing Director IQNet

IQNet President Mr Rene Wasmer and IQNet’s Managing Director Mr Tony Di Palma express their gratitude for Mr Alan Bryden’s willingness to share his thoughts and insights on this 20th anniversary of ISO 9001.






Alan Bryden has served as Secretary-General of ISO since March 2003. In October 1999, he was appointed Director General of the French national standards body, AFNOR. Between 1981 and 1999, Mr Bryden was Director General of the French national testing laboratory (LNE). During that period, he founded Eurolab (European Federation of Measurement, Testing and Analytical Laboratories) and served as its first President from 1990 to 1996. He also chaired the Laboratories Committee of ILAC (International Laboratory Accreditation Cooperation).

Mr Bryden began his career in metrology, notably with the National Bureau of Standards in the U.S. (today the National Institute of Standards and Technology) and has a strong background in the fields of quality and the rational use of energy. He was Vice-President of the first Committee on Technical Barriers to Trade in GATT (now WTO).