^The APQC Blog

In December of 2012, Tom Molyneux wrote about his experiences with process management and governance in a Successful Workplace blog titled BPM’s struggle over governance. In his article, he suggests that a lack of governance is a common reason that organizations experience process management failures.

Is your HR a strategic business partner to leadership? APQC is conducting a research study on how HR functions become strategic advisors to their internal clients. This research will explore proven success factors for developing and sustaining a strategic advisory approach to HR.

Like many, I was surprised to hear of CEO Marissa Mayer’s decision to ban telecommuting at Yahoo. The memo from HR lead Jackie Reses states, “speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home…we need to be one Yahoo! And that starts with physically being together.” I can see her point – I appreciate working from the APQC office and believe it increases my collaboration and innovation.

APQC’s Best Practices Study, Open Innovation: Enhancing Idea Generation Through Collaboration, is rolling along, and we’re excited about this research. In late January our participating organizations selected the best-practice partners that we will study, and site visits will start this month.

Last week, I hosted an APQC webinar on the financial close process that focused on how to streamline and automate financial reporting. More than 480 people signed up. This week, I was a guest presenter on a webinar produced by Proformative, an online professional community for finance and accounting professionals. More than 400 people signed up. No doubt about it!

Last month, we asked our knowledge management community call audience about the techniques their organizations use to connect employees with experts and tacit knowledge. The results show that most firms rely on at least two expertise location approaches, including communities of practice, discussion forums, collaboration sites, employee profiles, and social networking/microblogging.

APQC released the retail process classification framework (PCF) this past fall. Over the years, the APQC cross-industry PCF has proven a valuable and useful tool for a variety of organizations in multiple industries.

In Tom Sarner's recent HR Executive Online article showcasing survey results from APQC and ACT Bridge

APQC’s supply chain management and product development research agenda is expanding in 2013, and we want you to be involved. In this blog post I’ll give you a quick snapshot of our plans, give you a heads up on our next SCM Community Call, and highlight our Open Standards Benchmarking assessments.

The world has gone crazy over mobile—and finance is no exception. Mobile solutions have the capability to transform the way we operate, manage, and monitor the workplace. For finance in particular, “the immediacy of information that can be received, processed, analyzed, and then pushed back out—with all of this done remotely—is the real opportunity,” said Lawrence Maisel, founder the performance management consultancy DecisionVu.