^The APQC Blog

Most of you have probably seen the first excerpt we published from Carla O’Dell and Cindy Hubert’s new book The New Edge in Knowledge: How Knowledge Management Is Changing the Way We Do Business. Now, we’ve added another sneak peak from the book to APQC’s Knowledge Base—and this one is only available to APQC members.

The financial crisis of 2008 had ripple effects that we still feel today. Consider that CFOs and treasurers have been rewriting the rules for deploying spare operating cash.

What skills should every supply chain manager have? This question prompted a variety of answers from readers of the Q&A section of the Focus Research Web site.

More than three-quarters of organizations responding to APQC’s Work Force Capabilities 2011 survey indicated that senior management/executive leadership skills are somewhat or very difficult for them to secure. Eighty-six percent of these organizations plan to address this and other talent shortages by updating the content of their training and development courses and programs. APQC can help.

I’m looking for this year’s crop of best practice partners in process management – could it be you?

Ah, measurement… It's been too long since I wrote to you. You do such wonderful things for us in business. You show us how everyone is performing right now and warn us when there could be trouble ahead. What's more, you make new things happen and help people see how far we've come.

Over the past few weeks, several of our members have asked me whether APQC has any articles on selecting software to support KM approaches. In general, APQC aims to be vendor-neutral, and we don’t promote specific software solutions. However, we do have some articles on what to keep in mind when building or buying applications to enable knowledge sharing and collaboration.

Here are some general articles about selecting tools for KM:

Large companies that operate globally are now rethinking the way they manage significant risks, whether those risks are operational or financial in nature or whether they stem from weak strategic planning. They are not concerned so much about their well-honed processes for procuring and sourcing components, commodities, assembly, administrative services, etc. Rather, they worry about atypical risks that seem to be pooling into a critical mass.

Reports from The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times indicate that executive compensation has been on the rise. Help ensure your organization gets as much value as possible from its investments in the executive ranks by adopting best practices in executive performance management.

It’s no secret that “going green” is a hot topic among consumers and organizations alike. Consumers are becoming increasingly interested in where the products they purchase come from and how those products impact the environment. This can be seen in the rising popularity of Sourcemap.org, an open-source Web site that allows consumers and organizations to map the carbon footprint of products (and the materials that make up those products).