Established Knowledge Management (KM) Communities of Practice: Moving Across the KM Product Life Cycle

Abstract

Communities of practice (COPs) are a sub-set of knowledge management (KM) that provide a channel for people to interact and collaborate to achieve common goals. Benefits of COPs include global problem solving, leveraging best practices, time savings, and identifying future leaders. Since the global adoption of COPs and KM efforts in our industry, most companies have seen a rapid decline in community activity after initial deployment resulting in KM becoming a failed corporate initiative. In the product life cycle, these communities did not make the jump from the introduction to the growth phase. Some KM efforts and COPs do survive to the growth phase; however these established communities are not progressing along the life cycle curve due to little or no continual growth in activity levels and early adopters representing the bulk of users. The challenge for established COPs is to not just sustain activity levels but to create value for more users which will thus enhance the COPs' significance to the global organization.This paper discusses the effects of several methods used to progress COPs along the product life cycle, moving users from casual bystanders to active participants in discussion. Specifically, adopting Web 2.0 technology provides new ways to engage users to define value-added content, leverage social networking, and embrace collaboration. In addition to implementing new web-based technologies, a full-time knowledge transfer facilitator or knowledge broker fosters the growth of the community. Lastly, over time established COPs tend to gel around certain employee populations, and the knowledge broker must break these arbitrary barriers and engage other users in the organization such as supply chain management or laboratory personnel. With the combination of these methods, the COPs have been shown to progress along the product life cycle with increased adoption and added value for the organization.

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