Book and media reviews

Citation

Rebelo, T. (2017), "Book and media reviews", The Learning Organization, Vol. 24 No. 2, pp. 131-133. https://doi.org/10.1108/TLO-12-2016-0096

In this issue, two media reviews are presented, specifically reviews of the American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC) and the Organizational Learning, Knowledge & Capabilities (OLKC) websites. The general goal of these kinds of reviews is to share useful information, knowledge and debates that exist on the internet with our readers. In this way, a description of the websites is presented, along with some content highlights that justify their reviews in TLO.

Website: American Productivity & Quality Center

The APQC (www.apqc.org/) is a member-based nonprofit organization with more than 40 years of experience and more than 500 member organizations worldwide in all industries. APQC’s activity focuses on benchmarking, best practices, process and performance improvement and knowledge management. Its history is described on the website, but it is worth emphasizing that APQC was founded by C. Jackson Grayson in 1977, co-administered the Malcolm Baldrige Quality Award with the American Society for Quality for its first three years, created the North Star Project (a transformational public K-12 education improvement project) and has been honored with several awards on knowledge management. So it is not by chance that the banner’s phrase in introducing APQC is “productivity and quality improvement is a race without a finish line. Your organization’s future will be determined by how well and how quickly you learn, adapt, and improve” by Jack Grayson.

APQC’s site is structured around five sections (about APQC, expertise, services, membership, process framework and events). The website has plenty of rich and useful information and it is all worth visiting. However, taking into account the nature of our journal, four specific components were chosen to be highlighted in this review: the knowledge management section, the knowledge base collections, the “Big Thinkers, Big Ideas” interviews series and the APQC’s blog.

The knowledge management section is located in the “expertise link” and, among other features, presents the “APQC’s Knowledge Management Framework”, namely, the stages of strategy implementation and the actions necessary at each stage, as well as the APQC’s Knowledge Management Capability Assessment Tool, which aims to measure and evaluate “organization’s knowledge management competencies across four categories: strategy, people, process, and content and information technology”. The information that is freely available from APQC about knowledge management, its framework and its assessment tool, show that they are solidly grounded in experience and research. All in all, this website section gives an introductory vision into what is knowledge management, offers useful information for thinking about the implementation of the process of knowledge management, provides some clues and ideas about “how to do” knowledge management in organizations and is enough to help the decision making of contact APQC for more information about their methodologies and membership.

The APQC’s website has a link to the Center’s knowledge base, where can be found several content types of materials: articles and white papers, benchmarks and metrics, best practices and business drivers, case studies, infographics, key performance indicators and measures, presentations, product collections, reports and books and tools and templates. A search on APQC’s knowledge base can be done by topic, by process classification framework or by industry, which facilitates the search we are looking for. As expected, some of this material is only available to members. However, APQC also provides material that can be freely downloaded. The considerable dimension of this knowledge base; the variety of content types, namely, articles, reports, books and case studies; and the fact that it is updated with recent publications are major reasons to consider that it is a useful online source of information and knowledge that could serve both researchers and practitioners.

The “Big Thinkers, Big Ideas” interview series captures insights on learning, knowledge, innovation and leadership from some well-known personalities, such as Thomas Davenport or Larry Prusak. These interviews are conducted by the current APQC’s CEO Carla O’Dell, and can be found at www.apqc.org/knowledge-base/collections/big-thinkers-big-ideas-apqc-interview-series. The full text of the interviews becomes accessible through a simple registration on the website. This interview series allow us to know experiences, trends, books, ideas and visions about important topics for organizations. The variety and the quality of the interviewees along with the quality of the interviews make this collection an easy, and, at the same time, very interesting read.

The website has a link to the APQC’s blog in the upper right corner. Additionally, the blog can be directly accessed at www.apqc.org/blog. The posts can be searched by categories (such as human capital management, knowledge management, innovation and IT), which is an easy way to find the posts related to our interests and needs. A glance at this blog shows that it is a dynamic and diversified blog, where recent trends and organizational challenges are discussed, from, for instance, “how can organizations keep millennials from leaving” to “knowledge management workspace trends”. It is a good way for tracking what is happening on the topics covered by APQC, such as knowledge management or human capital, from trends and new theoretical and practical challenges to events, such as, for instance, the announcement of webinars. This blog allows comments, which is a very useful way of creating debate and development of ideas. However, there are few posts with comments, which limits the potential of this blog as a place for debate.

To sum up, this site provides relevant and updated information and knowledge on several areas of interest to organizations, namely, on knowledge management. It is a very complete and diversified site that provides from in-depth information (for instance, in its knowledge base) to news (for instance, in its blog). It also provides information about frameworks, tools and research developed by the APQC. However, the most relevant information (for instance, about study reports and tools) is only available for members, so we were lacking some of the data needed to fully understand some of the available information. This is an understandable option, but it may lead to some disappointment when a non-member is exploring the website, because the available information acts as a teaser to get them to want to know more about what they are reading.

Website: Organizational Learning, Knowledge & Capabilities

The website of the OLKC (www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/wbs/conf/olkc/) community is located at the Warwick University website (UK) and is hosted by the IKON Research Unit. IKON is based at Warwick Business School and “carries out funded research projects in the fields of innovation, information technology and organization studies”.

As stated on this website its:

[…] aim is to establish OLKC as a leading international conference for researchers in the fields of organizational knowledge and learning, and to build on the achievements of previous OLK (Organizational Learning and Knowledge) and OKLC (Organizational Knowledge, Learning and Capabilities) conferences.

Thus, the site “is a portal to information from past events, and to future conferences”, and hosts a repository containing papers presented at those earlier conferences.

Although the site (by the time of this review) is not up to date and the repository only has papers up to 2011, the full-text collection of previous conferences proceedings is large and of the interest, especially of those who research on learning and knowledge in organizations.

Taking advantage of the fact that we are reviewing this website, the next OLKC conference will be held at the University of Valladolid, Spain, from 26th to 28th April, 2017. More information about the 11th OLKC conference can be found at: www.olkc2017.com/event_detail/4239/detail/olkc2017.html