Communities of Practice
Let's continue the topic of virtual communities I started in my previous blog entry Distance Collaboration. I had the opportunity to read some materials I got from a workshop that our Customer Engineering Programs group held last week on the communities topic. Included was an article by Wenger/Snyder from the year 2000 on Communities of Practice (CoPs) as another organization form.
My blog entry about enterprise 2.0 referred to formal networks that could be used instead of matrix organizations. CoPs are in terms of structure the most lose organization form compared to informal and formal networks, project teams (matrix organization) and formal work groups (reporting to the same manager and as such reflecting the traditional hierarchical organization). Their purpose is mainly to develop member's capabilities and to build and exchange knowledge based on passion, commitment and identification with the group's expertise. Members of an informal network collect and pass on business information based on mutual needs. COPs are mostly virtual given today's business environment, self-driven and not accountable to any institution. Participation is on a purely voluntary basis and members of CoPs select themselves. To function they need a credible, sensitive leader with active listening skills and a sponsor.As a result of extensive knowledge building CoPs can drive strategy, generate new business lines, solve problems, promote the spread of best practices, develop people’s professional skills, and help companies recruit and retain talent by giving a home and new challenges to those who want to leave. They can be kind of incubators within the organization informally working on new contrarian ideas that at a more mature stage could be recognized as significant innovations.
How identify and build them? Management needs to recognize current trends with their employee populations. To make proof of those trends there could be an interviewing process to find out about the passion and interests of employees going in a certain direction. Then the company is able to provide infrastructure, like budget, places to meet, reward structures for participants, etc. Something that the Human Resources functions can help drive. The community itself will then start to give themselves ground rules, organize regular events.
To hold it together the passion and commitment of it's members needs to be sustained by a common sense of purpose (they know what binds them together) and a believe in the cause (worthiness, WIIFM – what is in it for me).
In terms of measuring the value of communities Wenger/Snyder refer to systematically listening to member's stories how they benefited from the community. Again formal interviews could help structuring this. In any way we need nontraditional methods of measuring the value of CoPs. Another possibility could be to assess each employees social capital by evaluating their community equity value consisting of measuring contribution, participation, skills and role equity of a person. Peter is actually engaged in this work at Sun and posted a blog on this concept today!
Posted at
08:49PM Jun 24, 2007
by Volker Seubert in Human Resources |
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Comments[1]
Posted by Peter H. Reiser on June 25, 2007 at 04:29 AM CEST #