^The APQC Blog

Something that surprised me at APQC’s 2015 Knowledge Management Conference was the audience reaction to six “future of work” trends futurist Andy Hines shared during his keynote. Andy described six potential surprises on the horizon, from generational shifts in the workplace to the rise of machine learning, the decoupling of work from physical offices, and the need to relax HR policies to attract the best talent.

The motto for strategic planning used to be “Think long-term!” —five, ten, fifteen years out. 

Throw that old adage out the window.  It never really worked, and now we don’t even have the illusion that it might.  No one can predict that far out anymore. If weather forecasts are relatively unreliable more than three DAYS out, what makes you think you can predict global markets, the vagaries of customer tastes, the pace of technology change or the moves of competitors?

I recently able to speak with Mathias Kirchner, Managing Director and Co-CEO at BPM-D  Inc., about how organizations can differentiate between which processes provide a competitive advantage and have a high impact on strategic value drivers and commodity processed which are more routine in nature.  

 Mathias will be speaking on our free webinar on June 17 at 11:00 a.m. CDT:  Targeting Value in a Digital World.

How do you get people to create innovative ideas while also pushing the importance of reusing knowledge?

This question came up at the end of APQC’s Knowledge Management (KM) Community Call, a webinar that featured Jean-Claude Monney and Mark Szalkiewics from Microsoft.

Here’s how Mark responded to this tricky—but important—question:

Thus far in our blog series we’ve traveled two-thirds of the way through the process improvement cycle:

The employee survey results—part of our first submission to The Houston Chronicle Top Workplaces list—were shocking. APQC was a good workplace, but not the great workplace that leaders and employees expected.

APQC made it a mission to move the needle on its employee engagement survey. Leaders wanted every employee to be able to look at that survey and say:

At APQC’s recent 20^th annual KM conference, the perennial question on how to create incentives for collaborative behavior came up.

In an earlier blog post, Scott Alexander, vice president of innovation at ROi (Resource Optimization & Innovation), described how ROi used innovation to re-imagine the supply chain and develop solutions to drive greater efficiencies, reduce costs, and produce sustainable change.

APQC recently interviewed Scott Alexander, vice president of innovation at ROi (Resource Optimization & Innovation). ROi is a provider-owned integrated supply chain organization serving both its founder, Mercy Health System, an integrated delivery network of 46 acute and specialty hospitals across Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma, and health care organizations throughout the U.S. who share a passion for supply chain excellence.

APQC’s research finds that best practice organizations actually don’t have significantly better search technology. Instead, they meet employees’ search needs with superior processes and approaches to content management.