Building and Sustaining Communities of Practice

Published by: American Productivity & Quality Center

Published: Apr. 5, 2001 - 205 Pages

Table of Contents

• Cap Gemini Ernst & Young
• DaimlerChrysler
• Ford Motor Company
• Schlumberger
• The World Bank
• Xerox Corporation

Abstract

KEY FINDINGS

• Best-practice organizations strategically select communities of practice for support based on importance to the business and business opportunities. Sponsors are less likely to have explicit criteria for community selection or to link them to the business strategy.
• Communities can be categorized by their primary business intent:
• to provide a forum for community members to help each other solve everyday work problems;
• to develop and disseminate best practices, guidelines, and procedures for their members to use;
• to organize, manage, and steward a body of knowledge from which community members can draw; and
• to innovate and create breakthrough ideas, knowledge, and practices.
• To sustain a community, senior management is not the most important factor.
• Management is instrumental in selecting communities, ensuring their link to business opportunities, and providing resources. Once the communities are selected, however, the most critical success factor (there are many) is the skill of the community leader.
• As evidence of the rising importance of communities in the knowledge work of organizations, 74 percent of the partners reported that operating units rely on communities to provide knowledge resources, and 66 percent of the partners said that communities set standards that operating units need to follow.
• Communities use a rich variety of media to communicate and work. The most frequently used tool for communication is e-mail. Many also use specialized KM community tools. E-mail appears to augment KM tools and integrate community responsibilities into day-to-day work.
• Organizations provide significant support resources to communities in the form of content managers and systems, community coordinators, and information technology applications. Models for support and funding vary, as does the amount and nature of support resources required by each community type.
• To become institutionalized, communities need to have a link to the formal organization. Although communities of practice tend to be boundary-spanning entities, their support structures tend to be tightly linked to and integrated with the formal organizational structure. This provides legitimacy and a connection to management support, funding, and shared resources.
• Membership requirements vary greatly across partner organizations, from voluntary to strongly encouraged to mandatory.
• Communities tend to be more member-driven and democratic than the formal organizational structure.
• There are two major categories of community measurement: assessing health and measuring impact. Appropriate measures are a direct reflection of community type. Partners that achieve desired results from their communities have either institutionalized them or are expanding them.


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