The role of CoPs in knowledge management

Communities of practice allow people with common concerns and aspirations to come together and exchange questions and ideas, often bridging organisational and geographical divides. Simon Lelic talks to representatives from AskMe, IBM, McDermott Consulting, Mitretek, Plural, Room, Skandia and Xansa, and asks how the power of communities should be harnessed to help realise an organisation’s broader knowledge management ambitions.

As Pat Shafer suggests in his article beginning on page 27, knowledge management is not rocket science; KM is in fact much harder to get right. An effective knowledge sharing initiative relies on a number of factors, each of which receives close attention on a regular basis in books, conferences, academic papers and journals such as this. Senior management sponsorship, an effective technical infrastructure, clearly structured processes: while the recipe may differ from company to company, the basic ingredients are the same. Yet without the commitment and passionate involvement of your staff, even the most lovingly crafted KM programme will fail, leaving little more than a sour taste in your mouth.

Which is where communities of practice come in. At their best, CoPs exemplify what most broader KM initiatives attempt to create on a grander scale: a thriving, collaborative association of people, catalysed by the willing and dedicated participation of its members. Scott Hawkins, sustainable synergist at Skandia Open Business Xchange, defines a global knowledge network (Skandia’s term for a community of practice) as: “A group united by a common concern or purpose, dedicated to supporting each other and enhancing their knowledge and performance to reach a shared goal.” More than a team, taskforce or project group, and different from a line or staff department according to Michael Fontaine, research consultant at IBM’s Institute for Knowledge Management, a CoP is an informal group that does not sit on the organisational chart. Rather, says Fontaine, its members come together to share a common practice, purpose, context, concern and passion for an area of subject matter expertise. The potential power and energy such associations of workers have is therefore easy to imagine.

Both Bob Lewis, director of knowledge management and emerging technologies at Mitretek Systems, and Susan Hanley, managing director of enterprise collaboration and content management at Plural, are careful to differentiate between a community of practice and a community of interest. The former, argues Lewis, organise themselves in a loose association in order to share experiences, insights and information about their field or craft, while the latter usually gathers around a particular issue within that field. And according to Hanley, a CoP is defined by three critical components. The first is a domain: the members must share some minimum level of knowledge of the domain, something that distinguishes them from other people. The second is a sense of community: members help each other, engage in joint activities and share information. Third, says Hanley, a CoP requires a practice. More than an interest, members are able to develop a shared collection of resources: stories, experiences, tools, best practices and so on.

The experience of this month’s participants indicates that communities of practice are usually created in one of two ways. Often, according to Richard McDermott, president of McDermott Consulting, CoPs form spontaneously by bubbling up from within the organisation. “They are wholly voluntary, born of the passionate interest of the members,” he says. Fontaine calls this natural evolution a “bottom up” process. Alternatively, communities can be formed through what Barry Bond, principal consultant at Xansa, describes as “planned organisational activity to achieve specific organisational goals”. Or, in Fontaine’s terms, following a “top down” model, when communities are created, funded and roles assigned from the outset. However, at Mitertek, according to Lewis, there is also a third approach: “We have the capability to derive communities. By this, I mean that the knowledge management system keeps track of the content that people access and can tag individuals as having certain interests. Thus, when we need to gather everyone together who may have interest in a particular subject, a list has already been compiled, and we can move swiftly toward assembling and staffing that derived community.”

Bond, for one, believes it is the CoPs that arise spontaneously that are generally the most successful. “Interventions can be helpful to keep things on track,” he says, “but too heavy a hand can stifle creativity and fail to recognise individuals’ personal objectives.” And as McDermott suggests, it can be difficult for strategically formed CoPs to really function as communities and not as a taskforce. Kevin Curtis, head of strategic marketing at Room Solutions, nevertheless feels that the function of a community should be closely aligned with corporate goals and objectives, something he says can only be achieved with direction from senior management, combined with buy-in from the community’s members. Similarly, Tony Small, group manager, Professional Services, at AskMe Corporation, believes the greatest value CoPs can offer stems from formalisation and organised support, although he argues that this should be built off the grassroots movement. Indeed, as Hanley puts it: “I don’t think one way is better than the other. However, for a community to really take shape, someone needs to take ownership for driving and leading the community. Without passionate and dedicated leadership, a community will not survive.”

However communities of practice are born, the potential benefits their existence has to broader organisational performance seemingly remain the same. In the words of Eric Lesser, research manager at IBM’s Institute for Knowledge Management: “Communities foster the reuse of intellectual assets by helping people find explicit knowledge and provide the vetting and context so that those assets can be used appropriately. They also improve customer responsiveness, enabling individuals to find answers to questions faster and respond to changes in customer requirements. Communities support innovation – they give individuals an opportunity to share insights and try out new ideas in a safe environment. Finally, communities help new employees climb the learning curve through formal educational opportunities and informal mentoring.” In addition, both Hawkins and Small point to the role a community can play in strengthening the bonds between its members, which, says Small, is important for employee retention. As Hawkins puts it: “A community’s culture, and the relationship formed among its members, raises the bar for any competitor seeking to replace Skandia’s relationships with its business partners, be they internal or external.”

Such returns are by no means inevitable, however. A community may just as easily wither and break apart before it can deliver tangible benefits to the organisation as a whole. To counter this, both Hanley and Small believe some form of high-level leadership for any community-based initiative is essential, both to drive participation within the communities and to promote the value of membership across the organisation. Small also maintains that the existence of formal processes, which may include a regular gathering of community members, an established procedure for sharing best practices and even the inclusion of CoP participation in employee evaluations, helps to ensure continued community activity and the long-term commitment of the members. Likewise, Hawkins and Bond feel management approval for employee participation, particularly during working hours, is critical. “Anyone managing a community member must understand that the time, and associated costs, spent by that member contributes to the overall long-term success of the company,” says Hawkins.

And while technological support is not a prerequisite for a community’s success, as Curtis says, it can certainly help in some situations. “Technology is critical for helping to connect a geographically dispersed community, especially for one that wishes to build a repository of its knowledge assets,” says Hanley. Lesser and Fontaine have identified what they see as the five key features of community-enabling technologies: repositories, where individuals within a community can access common documents and artefacts; asynchronous dialogue, where people can post inquiries and allow others to respond; synchronous dialogue, where members can chat and converse in real time, to more easily share and record tacit knowledge exchanges; web conferencing, to allow presentations and reaction across the group; and expertise location, where individuals can find others with experience in a given area and easily contact them. They also note, though, that such technology also raises the need for two additional community roles: that of facilitator, to network and connect community members and encourage participation, and that of content co-ordinator, to search, retrieve, transfer and respond to direct requests for the community’s knowledge and content from the knowledge repository.

There is, as Lewis says, a danger that by focusing on technology too early, an impersonal and distant atmosphere may be engendered among community members, and this is just one of a number of potential pitfalls that practitioners need to be aware of. Often, says Small, organisations fail to give CoPs enough time to attract enough members and reach the level of participation needed before their true value to the business becomes evident. “Executives who are disappointed with the short-term benefits of a community often pull resources away from it, which puts the CoP on a downward spiral before it can even get off the ground,” he says. Small goes on to recall a communities programme within a large technology firm that quickly faded into obscurity after the senior executive responsible for driving the programme simply lost interest. Similarly, Bond describes a CoP project at an energy company that failed primarily because an undue emphasis was placed on technology from the start, before a proper understanding of the way its members wanted to work was determined. Just as important, says Bond, participants were not recognised or rewarded for the contributions they made, nor were they permitted to take part in community activities during working hours.

Such examples are by no means exceptional. Accordingly, Hawkins goes on to outline what he feels are the critical elements that help ensure a community’s success. The first is participation. “Communities live and die by how well their members interact,” he says. Linking to this, a common language is also vital: “There is a greater chance of success if participating members share a common vocabulary and level of understanding.” Hawkins also believes a community has to have a sense of purpose, as well as a pervading feeling of trust. “Each participant must feel that their comments and interactions are taken seriously and that their jobs are not threatened by their participation,” he says. Finally, Hawkins believes it is crucial that members are afforded the time they need to make a prolonged, active contribution to the community. “Perhaps no other issue threatens the success of Skandia’s communities as this one does, because time is one resource our staff will never have enough of,” he says. “All of the cultural aspects can be in place and a system can be developed to effortlessly create an interactive environment, but if the participants don’t have the time to go to the community, all the previous efforts will fail.”

As important, of course, is an element of luck. No matter how well thought-out your communities initiative is, a degree of fortune, especially in terms of the coincidence between the ability and willingness of would-be members to participate, will often make the difference between a community that exists and one that positively flourishes. It is also important to remember that it is by no means a sign of failure if a community eventually closes up or even disintegrates. Even a successful community may have a natural lifespan, as Hawkins says, particularly in an organisation or industry in which the rate of change is high. The key, of course, is in ensuring a community is afforded the resources, leadership and flexibility it needs to make a positive contribution to your organisation’s operations while it can.