A Proposed Framework for Designing Sustainable Communities for Knowledge Management Systems

Abstract

Despite considerable academic and practitioner interest in knowledge management, success of knowledge management systems is elusive. This chapter provides a framework which suggests that KM success can be achieved by designing sustainable communities of practice. Communities of practice have proven to have significant economic and practical implications on organizational practices. A growing body of literature in KM recognizes the importance of communities that foster collaborative learning in organizations and almost all KMS have a 'network' component that facilitates connecting people in communities of practice. Evidence has shown that communities have been a key element in KMS of many companies including Xerox

Web 2.0 and Knowledge Sharing. A Literature Review

“…AI, Computer Science and Robotics Technology 3/14 KM and KS give organizations a competitive advantage. In the global economy, work is based on knowledge, and an organization needs to manage knowledge as an asset helping organizations to acquire and maintain their competitiveness in today's economy [4,25,26]. In today's organizations KM "is entering an era in which it is expected that everyone, starting from employees, is able and has the desire to significantly contribute to the creation and management of knowledge" [11, p. 3, 27].…”

“…CoPs are defined as people informally coming together because of their shared expertise and interest in specific areas [17][18][19][20]. The main purpose for the community for KMS is to share information, experiences, documents, and knowledge regarding best practices [5,25,26].…”

“…VCoP fulfill three main conditions for a group to become a community: join the community to seek and contribute knowledge, build the community by interactive engagement, and create a common storage of knowledge and best practices available to members. Participating in VCoP empowers and encourages participants to share and contribute knowledge, making organizations more effective [5,17,20,26,29,[38][39][40], as discussed in [6].…”

Situated Learning: Conceptualization and Measurement

“…Second, the importance of social interaction and context has been recognized in framing knowledge for information interpretation and decision making (Brown & Duguid, 2001;Inkpen & Tsang, 2005;Kale, Singh, & Perlmutter, 2000;Kogut & Zander, 1992;Nahapiet & Ghoshal, 1998;Tippins & Sohi, 2003;Zack, 1999). Networks and forums that encourage interaction between employees are common in most knowledge management systems (Goel & Mousavidin, 2008). Though we see the application of "situated" learning theories in organizational practices, there is a lack of theoretical development that allows us to conceptualize and measure the learning that occurs in such situations.…”