^The APQC Blog

On February 25, 2014 Carla O’Dell, CEO of APQC and knowledge management (KM) expert, led a conversation with Adam Grant, Wharton professor and author of the best-selling Give and Take (A Revolutionary Approach to Success) and APQC’s KM Advanced Working Group. The following is a condensed version of that conversation about the implications of Dr. Grant’s book for KM. In part one of the interview Dr. Grant talks about how the right incentives drive the behavior you want in your KM Community.

Organizations often find it challenging to develop and maintain effective communication with a diverse supplier network. In almost every industry, supplier relationships have a great influence over an organization’s ability to manage supply chain risks, improve processes, and service customers responsively while keeping costs low.

Process improvement is a systematic approach that helps an organization optimize its underlying processes and achieve more efficient results. Benchmarking is one way organizations can clearly identify focus areas for improvement efforts, establish performance baselines, set goals and/or identify new practices from best-in-class organizations.This infographic looks at the common practices and reason for using benchmarking to support process improvement efforts.

APQC talked to Darrin Brogan of EY about how culture change in KM is a daily challenge. Brogan is content strategy, quality, assurance, and measurement leader for enterprise content in EY’s knowledge organization. He’ll be delivering a presentation titled “Don’t Wait for Content: Using a Targeted Knowledge Collection Approach” at APQC’s 2014 Knowledge Management Conference on April 10-11 in Houston, Texas.

APQC is conducting a best practices study in the fall on rapid product and service development. We are currently looking for best-practice organizations to learn from and showcase in this study. Does your organization have best practices and processes for getting products and services to market faster?

One top priority for big company CFOs this year will be to cut the costs of financial management processes. Wait! Haven’t we seen this movie already? These costs have already been slashed over the past decade. Finance managers: prepare yourselves for “The Hangover Part III.”

Strategic planning requires an honest assessment of the organization’s current state and the external business environment to identify gaps and pinpoint ways to improve performance and meet goals. Benchmarking is one way an organization can collect the quantitative and qualitative information it needs for these assessments. This infographic looks at the common practices and reason for using benchmarking to support strategic planning efforts.

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.