We asked Engie’s Jan Vanoudendycke, head of knowledge management, what he finds most valuable about APQC membership.
About Engie
Engie is a global energy player and expert operator in the businesses of electricity, natural gas, and energy services. The group provides individuals, cities, and businesses with highly efficient and innovative solutions largely based on its expertise in four key sectors: renewable energy, energy efficiency, liquefied natural gas, and digital technology.
What tools, expertise, services, or information do you use the most?
Engie is a company of about 150,000 people in 70 countries, and our global knowledge management (KM) effort was formally launched in January 2016 after an organizational “health check” showed that we needed to boost the flow of knowledge across the organization. I discovered Engie’s APQC membership while I was looking for benchmarks, best practices, and maturity models to use as a starting point for our global KM initiative.
APQC is how we found other companies whose KM communities we could learn from. It became our source for information, benchmarks, and best practices.
APQC’s Resource Library houses a wealth of KM research. What I like about APQC white papers is that they are not 25 pages long, but rather two or three pages of very current information that really gets to the point and includes some references and even action items. I also like that we can participate in studies and webinars. It’s a very active, dynamic environment that helps big organizations start a KM program built on best practices, so they don’t have to start from scratch and can avoid errors.
How does APQC membership help you work smarter, faster, and with more confidence?
We have a community of knowledge managers in the company. We promote APQC in that community because it’s a membership for all of our KM team members, but many other people at Engie also surf the APQC website to find information.
APQC is a primary source of documents, templates, benchmarks, and best practices that can help people start KM activities, assess their KM practices, or find good practices to increase their KM maturity.
I explain APQC to my colleagues as a toolbox: a place where they can find good, practical tools, based on real-life stories, which can help people be more inspired. We can use these resources so that we don’t have to reinvent things, and instead, we build upon existing experiences in the world. APQC is a focused, trustworthy place to find information to improve your efficiency.