^The APQC Blog

At some point in your working life, you will likely ask yourself the following questions: Where will the next “Big Idea” for my business come from? How will it help my organization?  What will its impact be on my organization’s future competitive position?

Let’s face it: we all need buy-in. At work, we need it to get project funding, to obtain an investment in some new technology, and to receive approval from our peers. We need it a home, too—to get the family to stop arguing, to agree on a place for dinner, or to get a child to clean up her room. But what does getting buy-in really mean? 

In conjunction with the release of our Strategic HR Partnerships Best Practices Report, APQC is conducting a series of interviews with people who have experience with and are thought leaders on the topic of strategic HR business partnerships.

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 best-practice organizations featured in the report have senior managers that take an active sponsorship role for the open innovation initiative.

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 for the expense reimbursement process compared to their bottom-performing[1] peers. Those organizations have:

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 organizational transformation, suggests is that change can be easier if we adjust our mindset. He offers three new ways to think about change.

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. This survey provided information on current leadership trends. Questions asked include:

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. 

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.