QUALITY MANAGEMENT PROCESS ARCHITECTURE FOR QUALITY SELF ASSESSMENT IN HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS

In order for the society to trust universities abilities to satisfy, its expectations, the universities must take full responsibility for the quality of their own actions. At national and international level the quality assurance agencies, networks and associations are continuously developing tools and methods for quality evaluation, assurance and improvement. At national level, even though guano, assurance activities have been previously developed, the focus on higher education quality assurance was enforced by the creation of The Agency for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ARACIS), member of The European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA) since June 2009. The objective of this research is to develop process architectures specific for Higher Education Institutions in order to assess the characteristic processes of these institutions. The paper presents the quality management process architecture within a Higher Education Institute. The architecture is developed using the method "Integration Definition for Function Modeling" - IDEF0.