^The APQC Blog

After a year of chaos and disruption, organizational agility is in the spotlight. Organizational agility is the ability to quickly identify and execute initiatives for opportunities and risks that align with the organization’s overall strategy.

As you may have heard from us a few times, benchmarking is a top tool used by leadership teams to support decision making. So, to dig into that topic, APQC surveyed over 300 professionals—across functional boundaries—to understand their common benchmarking practices and the value derived from benchmarking. What we found is that benchmarking does indeed play a vital role in many organizations.

Organizations across the globe are already, or will be, grappling with a common dilemma: How to handle remote work post-pandemic. Employers are asking:

When you think about customer expectations, one thing that may come to mind is Amazon’s instant gratification business model. Consumers expect to immediately access information online about a specific product and its availability, and then very quickly obtain that product.

Good KM leaders always want their programs to be better. Even if KM is delivering phenomenal results, they seek out opportunities to hone the strategy, become more efficient, improve the user experience, or boost the value delivered back to the business. 

APQC’s founder, Jack Grayson, believed that true productivity encompasses both effectiveness and efficiency: “Efficiency measures if you are doing things right. Effectiveness concerns itself with whether you are doing the right things.”  

Many companies have ineffective internal controls programs due to an overwhelming amount of controls that don’t adequately consider risk.

The pandemic made heroes out of KM programs that had the three “P”s in place before the shutdown:

Many organizations take an approach to internal control management that has defined intersections with risk, compliance, and audit processes.

The goal of benchmarking is simple: To learn what works and how to avoid unnecessary mistakes. The challenge, and where the confusion comes from, is how to apply benchmarking as an effective management tool within an organization.