^The APQC Blog

Risk within the supply chain has become a growing concern for many organizations. Although natural disasters such as tsunamis and inclement weather often get the most attention, organizations should also be concerned with risks that can impact the systems supporting their day-to-day operations. One such risk is the potential for IT disruptions.

This month, the Busines Performance Innovation (BPI) Network published a report, Innovation: The New Competitive Equation. The report examines innovation strategies and roadblocks in today's enterprise. According to the report, 79% of survey respondents currently rate their companies' commitment to innovation as very high or growing. While the intention is there, companies are still experiencing significant roadblocks.  

As we started to prepare for 2015, APQC surveyed over 300 business excellence practitioners to understand their common challenges and priorities for upcoming year, including project management. What we found was that project managers continue to struggle with several project portfolio challenges, from ensuring the right mix of projects to meet organizational goals to evolving their measures to capture projects’ value to the organization.  This infographic explores the top challenges in project management and provides some simple tips for addressing them.

Lessons from SAS, One of the World’s Best Workplaces.

In the first three installments of this blog series we’ve discussed practical and tactical steps to:

I was recently able to speak with Jim DeLoach, a managing director at Protiviti, about how the implemention of the updated Committee of Sponsoring Organizations (COSO) Internal Control – Integrated Framework (Framework) during 2014 has been an important endeavor for many public companies in their efforts to comply with Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX).

Jim and his colleague, Keith Kawashima, also a managing director, will be speaking on our free webinar on April 22 at 11:00 a.m. CDT: COSO 2013 - Why Should You Still Care?

In my last musings, I pondered the impending death of knowledge management but never really came to a conclusion regarding its health: that is, whether or not we find it today on life support. The reason was due to a trip down memory lane, but that’s simply because I see that the parallels between digital computing and knowledge management are many (think: centralized, then decentralized, then centralized again, then decentralized again, then centralized making a comeback).

As a trained researcher, I’ve always been fascinated with using quantitative methods to predict human behavior in a number of settings. Although different business functions such as finance, logistics, and marketing are more mature in their use of predictive analytics to guide their business decisions, it is fairly new to HR. However, predictive workforce analytics can help the business figure out a number of challenges such as:

APQC recently talked to Beth Houlis, manager, knowledge management and information technology at Liberty Mutual Insurance, about the challenges her organization faced in building a knowledge management program from the ground up. Beth discusses the keys to making a business case, getting funding, building a strategy, and measuring initial ROI.

Beth Houlis will be a breakout session presenter at APQC’s 2015 Knowledge Management Conference April 30-May 1.  

Knowledge sharing networks and communities of practice are way more fun than organization restructuring. Networks and communities flatten the status structure and create cross-silo knowledge flows without the pain and disruption of reorganizing. I was reminded of this following my Big Thinkers, Big Ideas interview with Bob Buckman, who was an early adopter of KM when he was chairman of Bulab Holdings.