Enthusiastic and engaged senior leaders can play a vital role in enabling a successful open innovation strategy. This is one of the key enablers for open innovation identified in APQC’s recent Best-Practices Report Open Innovation: Enhancing Idea Generation Through Collaboration. Nearly all of the…

I had a very good question from a friend of mine using the Electric Utilities PCF in her organization and I wanted to share it with you.   She realized that the latest version of the Electric Utilities PCF differed from the latest version of the Cross Industry PCF and she wanted to know if…

Organizations that use fewer full-time equivalents (FTEs) to process travel and entertainment (T&E) reimbursements are ahead of the curve.  By using best practices such as automation and shared services centers, top-performing organizations require a fraction of the FTEs…

Change has a reputation for being difficult, hard, and stressful. But what if we modified that perception? What if we started to view change differently? Would we be able to make organizational changes more easily? One thing that Ron Ashkenas, a senior partner of Schaffer Consulting and expert on…

Forbes wrote an article on the top qualities for leaders today. But what is the state of today's organizational leadership? APQC conducted a brief survey on the state of leadership in today's organizations. Employees and leaders are interested in the factors that affect existing leadership…

The interesting thing about our knowledge management (KM) taxonomy is that IT falls under KM. From time to time we get a couple of Ask Us requests about IT, and our research isn't as full in the area of IT.  Well, turns out from looking at our Open Standards Benchmarking in IT, there’s a…

Many organizations have adopted computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) software, enterprise asset management (EAM) software, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software to help improve daily working capital transactions. APQC’s 2011 report Improving Working Capital Management and…

APQC and other survey results show that few HR functions are working closely with business leaders to set and deliver upon organizational strategy. Most HR functions only occasionally engage with internal client leaders in a business partner, strategic advisor capacity. What are strategic HR…

This thing I like to call knowledge management (KM for short) reminds me of another time in my career where having certain skills and experience didn’t seem to make the “big leagues” of professions. Yet, what I learned then seems all too appropriate for what I’m doing today in KM. So much so that I…

According to a recent blog post, The top three barriers to effective BPM,  that Chris Taylor wrote on SuccessfulWorkplace.com, there are generally three big challenges associated with implementing business process management (BPM) initiatives. First, Taylor said many organizations struggle…