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Communities of Practice: Capturing Organisational Value in Knowledge.

By Paul Ormonde-James

“Knowledge cannot be separated from the communities that create it, use it, and transform it”

Organisations today are coming to the realisation that the knowledge worker actually has some value! Gone are the days where workers performed specifically the task given and were not valued for their wider understanding. There is no doubt that workers manipulate more explicit data today as part of their function, but real corporate value is in the tacit knowledge they develop.

"In the information age, things are ancillary, knowledge is central. For more and more companies, the ratio of market value to book value is a multiple of three, five, ten or more. A company's value derives not from things, but from knowledge, know-how, intellectual assets, competencies -- all of it embodied in people. And none of it's on the balance sheet”

Today, corporations fact the problem of capturing “know-how”. Knowledge that is not written, nor appears in training manuals but which allows workers to solve problems through experience. Much of this experience has taken time, on the job, to learn and adds value to the organisation in the individuals ability to perform tasks quickly and accurately. The issue does not surface until someone leaves and needs to be replaced, suddenly the organisation is placed into chaos as it strives to replace the tacit knowledge gained by the individual. Unfortunately this information goes with the employee. Cost to regain the knowledge is both costly and time consuming, rarely does the organisation recover quickly from the loss.

There is a way to begin to capture and disseminate the knowledge people gain on the job. It dates back to the cave man where skills were passed down from elder to younger. Those days is was about survival, funnily enough it is so today. Today we call the process a community of practice (CoP).

The process produces a group of individuals that share a common purpose. It could be the same job as in trades people or technical workers; it could be the same service like call centre workers; it could be collaborative work like software designers. The goal is to bind colleagues together whose common responsibility is to deliver a certain type of real work.

The CoP’s are small groups of people that are drawn together through common purpose or sociability. They work outside formal structures, infact formal structures will crush the CoP from delivering value.

Well focussed CoP’s exhibit all the qualities of a small community

• The relationships bond members in common goals
• The group will set itself goals and priorities
• The group will exhibit management characteristics outside the formal structures. Showing leaders, followers, casual, emotional, friendships
• Knowledge within the group is shared through “war stories” which bread reciprocity and respect.

In today’s technical age distance is not the issue it used to be. Virtual Communities of Practice (VCoP)can exist at a cheap cost. These VCoP’s can exist to facilitate group discussions BUT they are not the same as the personal contact. Ways of achieveing this can be via online chat or e-learning forums. Organistaions will often set up intranet portals for the facilitation of VCoP. Either way it is important to have a facilitator or moderator and for that person to maintain some guidance over the content.

Why bother with this concept, well it is already going on in your organisation at an informal level but no one knows. The challenge is to bring this out in the open and build upon it.

Article by Paul Ormonde-James

Paul, has spent many years in the field of Change Management. He has qualifications in Cybernetics (Robotics & Artificial Intelligence), Computer Sciences, and a MAster of Business Administration (MBA). He has driven many change programs and used Business Intelligence, Competitive Intelligence and Knowledge Management to drive such cultural change to increase company value.

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