^The APQC Blog

Technology of the future will change our experience, but self-awareness is a change in consciousness. Change really comes down to whether or not people feel safe to explore new things, feel supported as they are learning, and feel confident in themselves and their ability to navigate this digital explosion.

Balancing budgets and educating kids – it’s all part of the frantic pace of a typical school year. There’s always room for improvement in school district operations, but finding the time, money and people to create positive change often requires a force of will. As the old saying goes, if you want to keep achieving the same results, keep doing the same things.

Recently we worked with the leader of a large accounts payables group who had been asked by his CFO to comment on how their shared services accounts payable group matched up to benchmarks. In helping him answer that question we identified some very important principles to keep in mind when using quantitative benchmarks.

APQC asked a roundtable of knowledge management professionals about the biggest mistakes people make in KM strategy, how to identify problems that KM can solve, and the common traits of successful KM programs. All of our roundtable participants will be presenters at APQC’s 2018 KM Conference April 16-20 in Houston.

The roundtable included the following participants:

The focus of HR shared services is changing. Fewer organizations are wrestling with how to implement HR shared services. More are challenged with improving HR shared services performance.   

APQC recently concluded its latest financial management “trends and challenges survey”−260 midsize to large organizations from around the globe participated in the survey −and the data shows some interesting results.

Knowledge loss goes by lots of names: “The Big Crew Change” in oil and gas; “The Baby Boomer Exodus” and “Corporate Amnesia” across business and government. They all point to the retirement of a whole generation of experts and the loss of what Dorothy Leonard has coined as deep smarts: business- or organization-critical, experience-based knowledge.

APQC research tell us that a documented KM strategy is an accelerator of KM maturity, and over the past couple of years, you’ve probably heard us talk once or twice (maybe three or four times) about the importance of documenting your organization’s KM strategy. You may have thought to yourself, “I got it! Been there, done that. C’mon APQC, what’s next?”

If you didn’t think cognitive computing and artificial intelligence (AI) were at the top of everybody’s mind at the beginning of 2017, you certainly could be forgiven for thinking so by the end the year.