At the beginning of the year we surveyed a group of 260 finance professionals from across industries and regions to find out what their priorities were for 2018. The results were at once simple and complex.  The top two finance function priorities for 2018 were: Implement new…

What comes to mind when you hear the name “Elon Musk”? APQC—right? Just kidding. Even though Mr. Musk has no affiliation with APQC, you could be forgiven for thinking that he does, since both he and APQC are such vociferous proponents of robotic process automation (RPA). We believe that RPA is one…

We’re roughly a quarter of the way through 2018 and from what I can tell so far, this year isn’t too different from last year. Everyone is still ad dicted to their smart phones, the weather is still crazy, and the Houston Rockets are still the best team in professional basketball. Yep…hardly…

If you didn’t think cognitive computing and artificial intelligence (AI) were at the top of everybody’s mind at the beginning of 2017, you certainly could be forgiven for thinking so by the end the year. It seemed like not a week went by that a cover of a major business periodical/website wasn’t…

(Hopefully you read the blog title with a Deep South accent.) Happy holidays, reader! I’m going to begin this post with a slightly embarrassing self-quote from 5 years ago, when I was a first-year MBA student. The following is an excerpt from the introduction I wrote for a marketing plan…

You can tell a lot about how digital your life has become simply by examining the thirty minutes before and after you sleep each night. When I woke up this morning, the first thing I did was swipe the screen of my [digital] phone to turn off my [digital] alarm clock, which was blaring Your Love is…

At APQC, we like to maintain constant contact with our members to ensure that our research aligns as closely as possible with their business needs. While our members’ interests and challenges fluctuate from year to year, one piece of feedback we receive from them remains constant: they love case…

  About a month ago, I got the chance to interview Lauren Haynes, Associate Director at the Center for Data Science and Public Policy at the University of Chicago and a fellow presenter at next week’s Predictive Analytics World conference in Chicago. Lauren and I talked about how data…

When I was in secondary school learning how to write essays, my teachers beat me over the head with the following adage about how to structure a paper: “tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them.” Well, I’m about to tell you what I’m going to tell…

In case you haven’t been stalking my LinkedIn page—and you really should; it’s a thrilling read— I’d like to take this opportunity to inform you that I am, in fact, a Los Angeles-based, remote employee of APQC. This means that, periodically, I travel to Houston for a week or so at a time to…