Communities of Practice [CoPs] are are viewed as an excellent way to discover, share and keep key knowledge in the organization -- especially critical tacit/informal knowledge that is hard to document and retrieve.
When management decides to implement CoPs they usually take an approach similar to drawing the organization chart -- they start slotting people into groups/communities where they "should be." This method is rarely successful because it ignores the many relationships, knowledge exchanges, and information flows that have already emerged around any capability, skill, interest, or process in an organization.
At IBM, executive consultant Gerry Falkowski found that it was easy to discover existing communities of interest/practice using organizational network analysis [ONA]. This method allows management to build upon, instead of ignore, the knowledge flows and exchanges that were already in place and growing.
Below is a social network map of an emergent community of practice discovered at IBM.
The colors of the nodes designate which formal department the employee node belonged to. The black links show the connections amongst the core members of the network. The grey links show the connections amongst the peripheral members of the network
IBM, working along with Orgnet, LLC on this project, wrote the APQC report: Building and Sustaining Communities of Practice that explains how organizational network analysis is used to discover communities of practice.
Where are the emergent communities of knowledge, expertise, and interest in your organization... and what are they talking about?
Interesting approach to discover CoPs. Do you know what questions were used to discover the CoP because they can be CoP on a variety of topics I imagine?
ReplyDeleteIt reminds me to and article (and a 1973 research) that empasized the importance of "weak ties", i.e., second and third level connections, in innovation.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.innovationexcellence.com/blog/2013/09/13/how-social-networks-drive-innovation/