^The APQC Blog

When you hang out in APQC’s Houston office with Carla O’Dell and Cindy Hubert, the fact that good KM programs are founded on good business cases is ingrained in your psyche. So, when we polled the audience at our last KM conference, I was surprised to see that 28 percent of attendees said their organizations had no business case for KM. Obviously, we need to do more to get the word out about the importance of business cases!

Last week Marisa Brown and I hosted a Webinar on the newest supply chain management content in the Knowledge Base. If you want to find out what’s new and what we have planned for the rest of the year, watch the video of the Webinar or take a look at the slides. The slides include links to the new content as well as some reference information at the end on older supply chain management content. Enjoy!

APQC is studying enterprise risk management (you can check out our newest report on this topic), and so is our member IBM. Now we want to know how organizations align operations and finance to monitor, mitigate, and monetize risk. We invite you to participate in IBM’s global survey on Enterprise Risk Management to share your viewpoints on your organization’s challenges, strategies, and initiatives.

Love risk but hate loss?  You're not alone.

“This new market strategy is great… but what if we lost one of our key clients?” “This product has the potential to make a huge splash… but should we stray too far from what we are known for?” “This improvement proposal could improve our efficiency, safety, and alignment significantly… but the up-front cost is pretty high.”

As part of a Collaborative Benchmarking study that’s going on right now, APQC is researching and writing about organizations that excel at engagement and participation for knowledge management. These are firms that have figured out how to make KM fun while inspiring people to work together and share their knowledge.

In today’s New York Times, Catherine Rampell reports that some employers are discouraging the unemployed from applying for job openings and/or filtering out jobless applicants. Rampell’s article, “The Help-Wanted Sign Comes With a Frustrating Asterisk,” lists a number of reasons why employers may be taking this step, some of which I have listed below. 

I've almost finished reading Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com. I'm sure many of you have already read it since it came out last year and was #1 on The New York Times Bestseller List. But this was my first time through it. Fascinating book! I highly recommend it. The book got me thinking...how do most organizations deliver happiness? And how crucial is the supply chain to that happiness? 

Don't sweat your financial reporting, budgeting, and planning processes this year. APQC has just released two insightful white papers Fast Delivery of Complex Financial Reports –How Leading CFOs Do IT and How Corporate Financial Analysts are Dealing with Uneven Growth.

Yesterday, I hosted a Webinar all about the new “Business Excellence” content in the Knowledge Base. If you are at all curious about the latest and greatest that we have in process management, measurement, benchmarking, and innovation, check it out here:

Now in the Knowledge Base: Business Excellence

Amidst economic struggles and high unemployment levels, skills shortages endure. Particularly persistent and acute is the shortfall of scientific, technical, engineering, and mathematical (STEM) talent. Consider these findings from APQC’s recent Work force Capabilities survey.