Readings for This Week

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Readings for This Week

• Wenger, E and Snyder, W. Communities of
  Practice Harvard Business Review. Jan-Feb 2000.
  pp. 139-145
• Storck, J and Hill, P. Knowledge Diffusion
  through Strategic Communities. Sloan Management
  Review. Winter, 2000, pp. 63-74

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Communities of Practice (CoP)

• The realization of the importance of context
• CoP -- They are groups of people informally
  bound together by shared expertise and passion
  for a joint enterprise Wenger and Snyder, 1999
• CoP is a term that refers to the ways in which
  people naturally work together. It acknowledges
  and celebrates the power of informal communities
  of peers, their creativity and resourcefulness in
  solving problems, and inventing better, easier
  ways to meet their commitments.

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Communities of Practice (CoP)

• CoP are peers in the execution of 'real work'.
  What holds them together is a common sense of
  purpose and a real need to know what each other
  knows." - John Seely Brown, VP and Chief
  Scientist, Xerox Corp
• Michael McMaster articulated the essence of this
  trend as follows "fostering the growth and
  development of such communities will provide the
  maximum in learning, knowledge development and
  flexibility of response to the marketplace."

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An Emerging Organizational Form

• May or may not have an explicit agenda
• Share experiences and K in free-flowing, creative
  ways that foster new approaches to problems
• CoP can
• Drive Strategy, generate new lines of business,
  solve problems, promote the spread of best
  practices, develop professional skills, recruit
  and retain employees

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What is the business value that CoPs can deliver
to the organization?

• Their value propositions include
• Developing and spreading better practices faster
• Connecting hubs of knowledge" into
  self-organizing, knowledge sharing networks of
  professional communities
• Feeding and being fed by web-based repositories
  of proven solutions as well as new approaches
• Fostering cross-functional and cross-divisional
  collaboration
• Increasing the participating employees' ability
  to initiate and contribute to projects across
  organizational boundaries

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Why hasnt it become more prevalent?

• It is just beginning to receiving some popularity
  among business organizations
• It is not easy to build and sustain CoP or
  integrate them with the rest of the organization
• The organic, spontaneous, and informal nature of
  CoP makes them resistant to supervision and
  interference

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Why and how is CoP formed?

• Employees with similar functional expertise to
  maintain connections with peers
• CoP is formed in response to changes originated
  from inside and outside the organization CoP can
  also be found within a business unit or across
  different units and companies
• CoP can be a large group but with core
  personnel providing intellectual and social
  leadership
• Large CoP is divided by geographic or by subject
  matter

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Cultivating CoP

• Identify potential CoP that enhance the companys
  strategic capabilities
• Provide the infrastructure that will support such
  communities and enable them to apply their
  expertise effectively
• Use nontraditional methods to assess the value of
  the companys CoP

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Source Verna Allee
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Internal consultants form team to support CoP
(example)

• In NCR's Worldwide Services organization a team
  of OD consultants are helping their internal
  clients identify existing communities and foster
  new communities that encourage increased
  knowledge sharing.
• Using advanced communication technologies based
  on the WWWW, the KM/CP Team has provided new
  methods of interaction for communities composed
  of service sales and delivery associates. The
  team has also studied many of the non-technical,
  personal and interpersonal dimensions of
  communities and applies this knowledge in its
  work.

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Management Funds CoPs (example)

• The PLL community does not "report" to any
  business unit or product line it is of, by, and
  for its members. It won special funding to
  develop two advanced PLL prototypes outside the
  control of any specific product group. It has
  even created a "PLL place" -- a lab, borrowed
  from one of the product groups that benefits from
  its work.
• National wants to extend the success of the PLL
  community across the company. (There are now four
  recognized CoPs at National). It has created a
  CoP Council to provide advice on CoP, offer
  technology support, and lobby for funding for
  community projects. It has distributed a CoP
  Toolkit to help rank-and-file technologists build
  their own CoP. It encourages CoPs to create home
  pages on the WWWW to help members communicate
  with each other -- and to share their work with
  the rest of the company

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Principles of Effective Strategic Communities

• Design an Interaction format that promotes
  openness and allows for serendipity
• Build upon a common organizational culture
• Demonstrate the existence of mutual interests
  after initial success at resolving issues and
  achieving corporate goals

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Principles of Effective Strategic Communities

• Leverage those aspects of the organizational
  culture that respect the value of collective
  learning
• Embed knowledge-sharing practices into the work
  processes of the group
• Establish an environment on which knowledge
  sharing is based and cultural norms defined by
  the community rather than parts of the
  organization