Meet Sjoerd Boomsma of the Netherlands, who thought he would put his big boy pants on and claim the Oxebridge reporting was “fake news” on LinkedIn. It isn’t ending well for Mr. Boomsma.
Boomsma, who appears to eat crayons, runs the Dutch QMS consulting company “Bring Out the Best.” Keep that name in mind since it’s about to become very ironic.
As reported the other day, the Committee Draft of ISO 9001:2025 has been scrapped, and a new “CD2” is being developed in its place. BSI is largely leading this effort. When I posted a link on LinkedIn to the news article, Boomsma thought he’d pull a Paul Simpson and froth at the mouth in defense of TC 176. The problem is that TC 176 members are held to two crucial ISO policies, and having a meltdown on social media ensures they violate them. (Simpson, for his part, quit TC 176 after we filed an ethics complaint against him for that very behavior.)
So, Boomsma decided the best way to disprove my reporting was to confirm it. Yes, you read that right. In his rant, he actually confirmed that CD2 is underway and even posted a screenshot of an internal TC 176 document to prove it.
Unpack that: the idiot posted an internal document (violation 1) to prove the thing he falsely claimed was untrue (violation 2.) Why are these statements violations? You see, per the ISO social media policy, TC 176 members are not allowed to post internal documents, nor can they harass and attack critics. He did both in one five-minute session!
Let’s look at the screenshots, since Boomsma’s posts are set to disappear any day now, along with his TC 176 membership.
As for the claim made by our reporting that BSI has an outsized level of influence on the CD2 work? Well, while Boomsma was saying that was fake, too, I checked his LinkedIn profile:
Oops.
So I immediately filed an ethics complaint with ISO, TC 176, the ISO TMB, BSI, and CQI/IRCA. (Boomsma has IRCA credentials.) All of those organizations have rules against the behavior that Boomsma engaged in, publicly.
To be clear, I was never “banned” from TC 176. They can’t ban me since TC 176 does not decide who member nations can nominate or not. Yeah, ANSI may not want me on the US TAG—although the winds may be shifting on that—but I resigned and was never banned.
And, as with most of the private consultants working on TC 176, poor sadsack Boomsma is begging for clients, as we see here:
The trick of trying to use your TC 176 membership as a means of getting ISO 9001 consulting clients never works. Folks like Jack West, Lorri Hunt, Jose Dominguez, Devindra Chattergoon, Paul Palmes, and Paul Simpson got barely any consultants from their many years on the committee. I suspect they’d be lucky if they had more than 1 or 2 clients at any given time, and more than 4 or 5 per year. I’m working eleven simultaneously, just right now! (And I mean full implementation clients, not one-off training sessions.) So there’s an argument to be made that working on TC 176 harms your consulting practice (you’re too busy going to meetings and not actually consulting), but these windowlickers never learn.
So the moral of the story is that if you’re on TC 176, you may want to read the official ISO Policy on Communication of Committee Work and ISO’s Code of Ethics and Conduct before mouthing off on LinkedIn like you’re some kind of gunslinger in an old western. If you don’t, you’re likely to shoot off your own foot.
Christopher Paris is the founder and VP Operations of Oxebridge. He has over 35 years’ experience implementing ISO 9001 and AS9100 systems, and helps establish certification and accreditation bodies with the ISO 17000 series. He is a vocal advocate for the development and use of standards from the point of view of actual users. He is the writer and artist of THE AUDITOR comic strip, and is currently writing the DR. CUBA pulp novel series. Visit www.drcuba.world
