We asked Air Liquide’s Evelyn Duchemin, CoP and expert network manager, what she finds most valuable about APQC membership.
About Air Liquide
The world leader in gases, technologies and services for Industry and Health, Air Liquide is present in 80 countries with approximately 65,000 employees and serves more than 3.5 million customers and patients. Oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen are essential small molecules for life, matter and energy. They embody Air Liquide’s scientific territory and have been at the core of the company’s activities since its creation in 1902.
What expertise, tools, and services do you use most?
There are a lot of things, but I was very inspired by the presentation on wikis, so I read more about it in your Knowledge Base, giving us a solid foundation to implement our own wiki at Air Liquide. I also really like the AI discussions, and your knowledge management (KM) roadmap tools helped me structure the roadmap for Air Liquide. Through APQC’s research we found it most useful to split our roadmap into three categories; and ensure we had programs aligned for each category.
How does APQC membership help you work smarter, faster, and with more confidence?
In summary, my journey with APQC has been like this—first, they helped me get up to speed on what I am supposed to be doing. Then they inspired me. Now they are backing me up on pushing the concepts I want to see come to life.
First, APQC got me up to speed on what KM is. The Communities of Practice pre-conference workshop at the KM Conference was a source of benchmarking to identify what communities look like in the industry, not just what my manager had in mind.
The second year working with APQC really opened my eyes to more ideas, integrating different approaches into our KM roadmap. We’ve been around for more than 100 years, we move slowly, and some things are very different than what they’re used to. Accepting we need to spend some money for new technologies is a hard sell as well. A lot of times, I’m being asked for new ideas, and when I have an idea, I need APQC’s benchmarking literature to show I’m not inventing stuff that’s been created out of the blue, that other companies are doing it. That’s very reassuring for management.
Being a member of APQC gives us the expertise we don’t have to help us leverage our knowledge and get better at doing what we need to do; instead of figuring it out on our own and having to become KM experts, we leverage the knowledge APQC provides.