^The APQC Blog

APQC recently spoke to Rebecca Glassman, senior manager of knowledge management at Opower, about how her organization cleaned up its internal wiki and made it a thriving part of the Opower KM program. Rebecca will deliver a presentation titled “Curating Content: Engaging Wiki Users at Scale” at APQC’s 2014 Knowledge Management Conference  being held April 10-11 in Houston, Texas.

APQC recently spoke to Jennifer Cheung, director of knowledge management at Cisco, about how her organization improved its KM program through innovation and crowdsourcing. Cheung will deliver a presentation titled “Harnessing the Collective IQ and Fostering Innovation” at APQC’s 2014 Knowledge Management Conference April 10-11 in Houston, Texas.

Social recruiting is among the top 5 HR trends that HR functions are prioritizing in 2014. Yet, using social media in the performance feedback process is not a priority for HR. These are among the findings of APQC’s newly released HR Performance, Priorities, and Trends survey report. According to guest blogger Dave Clemens, senior writer for Rapid Learning Institute and writer of The HR Café Blog, social media has already changed HR.

“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears…” (Spanky McFarland, Our Gang 1935)—and your thinking. During APQC’s latest Advanced Working Group (AWG), which ended this February, a long-time nemesis of marketing knowledge management was tackled (or at least slowed down): enumerating the value of knowledge—or more specifically, developing some measure for the value of a single knowledge asset or object. Why is this important? Because messaging the value of knowledge management depends upon one’s ability to show that knowledge itself has value in the first place.

Organizations are constantly looking for ways to make their product and service development efforts more efficient so they can get to market faster. In some industries, the rapid pace of technology development makes the pressure to stay ahead of the competition even greater.

Is talent a top CEO priority for 2014? Has HR big data “arrived”? Is HR prepared to deliver on CEO objectives? How is HR doing in engaging and retaining employees and in generating return on human capital investments? Check out the infographic below for answers to some of these questions and download it for free in APQC's Knowledge Base.

If you’ve read my posts related to benchmarking, you know I feel relevance is vital to making benchmarking real for most organizations. This is an area I continue to examine with organizations providing, as well as consuming, benchmarking information. Relevance is the issue currently holding benchmarking, as a tool, back from providing maximum value to business leaders, but, we will solve it. Here is how I see it evolving right now.

Industry Isn’t Relevance

APQC recently talked to Dean Sorensen, founder of IBP Collaborative, on the benefits and challenges of integrating sales and operations planning (S&OP) and enterprise performance management (EPM) in finance and supply chain functions.

Dean Sorensen, a management consultant, helps organizations make step-change improvements to how they plan and manage their businesses. He helps organizations share innovative and integrated planning and performance management practices and technologies that enable these improvements.

APQC was fortunate enough to talk to Karen Lekowski of John Deere about how her organization improved its knowledge management program by asking employees what they needed most. Karen works in Enterprise Content Management Services at John Deere and will be presenting on this topic at APQC’s 2014 KM Conference. You can follow her on Twitter at @klekowski.

In part two of our interview with Alice MacGillivray, she talks about why leadership is critical to a culture of collaboration. In part one of this interview, she talked about boundaries, leadership, and use of edge-effect. Alice MacGillivray, Ph.D., is a management consultant who works at the intersection of knowledge management, complexity, and leadership.