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Library of Congress Catalogingin-Publication Data
Knowledge and communities / edited by Eric L. Lesser, Michael A. Fontaine, Jason
A. Slusher.
p. cm.-(Resources for the knowledge based economy series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7506-7293-5 (paper: alk. paper)
1. Organizational learning. 2. Knowledge management. 3. Community
life. 4. Community, I. Lesser, Eric. 11. Fontaine, Michael. 111. Slusher,
Jason. IV. Resources for the knowledge-based economy
HDS8.82.R47 2000
307-dc21
00-039808
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I.. Preface
The subject of communities in the business environment has recently taken
on heightened interest among some of the world’s largest companies. Organiza-
tions such as BPAmoco, Royal Dutch Shell, IBM, Xerox, The World Bank, and
British Telecom have all undertaken significant community development efforts
in an attempt to leverage the collective knowledge of their employees. These
organizations, and many others, have begun to recognize that knowledge critical
to business success is often created and shared by informal groups of individuals
with common work practices or interests. This includes both the firm’s explicit
knowledge (i.e,, knowledge that is captured in a written or visual form) and the
informal social networks that contain the more tacit forms of knowledge. These
communities also serve as the repository for the organization’s memory, preserv-
ing valuable insights that can be easily lost in an age of employee mobility and
early retirement.
Many of these early community-building activities have illustrated a host
of potential benefits, both to the organizations that sponsor them and the indi-
viduals who partake in them. In our work with members of the IBM Institute
for Knowledge Management, we have seen community development efforts lead
to increased revenues from new business development, greater efficiency from the
reuse of knowledge assets, and greater levels of innovation. Further, community
participation can also provide a number of benefits that are less tangible, though
equally significant. These include developing a heightened sense of identity among
disparate workers, improving one’s access to experts within the organization,
and decreasing the time associated with acclimating to a new job or position.
While these benefits are somewhat more difficult to quantify, they play a critical
role in the success of the knowledge-based firm.
It is also not surprising that many companies are undertaking community
initiatives in hopes of better leveraging not only their own knowledge, but the
knowledge of external parties, such as customers, suppliers, and alliance partners.
Using online communities, organizations are hoping to foster critical interactions
between and across organizational lines. While primarily virtual in nature, these
communities have been able to encourage conversations that exchange valuable
knowledge across the value chain and reinforce a sense of loyalty among business
partners.
vii
...
Vl l l Preface
COMMUNITIES: PEOPLE, PLACES, AND THINGS
People
At their most basic level, communities consist of three components: people,
places, and things. Not surprisingly, people are the primary ingredient in any
community effort. A community is composed of people who interact on a regular
basis around a common set of issues, interests, or needs. In these communities,
individuals participate through sharing experiences, pooling resources, represent-
ing the interests of larger groups, and building relationships with other like-
minded individuals. Community participation is often voluntary, with individuals
opting to play different roles with varying levels of intensity and time commit-
ment. Some individuals will serve as the nucleus, directing and shaping the
community’s direction and resource allocation. Others will operate on the periph-
ery, tapping into the community knowledge and insight on an as-needed basis.
To maintain the relationships between individuals, formal roles and responsibil-
ities are sometimes developed to improve the community’s effectiveness. For
example, communities may retain a small staff to maintain membership lists,
recruit outside speakers, and help in scheduling community meetings and activ-
ities. However, at the core, people who voluntarily contribute time, energy, and
other scarce resources in the pursuit of common interests ultimately drive com-
munities.
Places
To be effective, communities need places for their members to gather. In
conventional community environments, the place is often a physical space where
members meet and exchange ideas and insights. Whether it is a conference room
where software developers hold an open breakfast every Tuesday, or a local
restaurant where delivery workers meet to discuss the day’s efforts, the physical
place helps establish a common reference point where individuals interact with
others engaged in similar practices. This place becomes a unique identifier that
reinforces the group’s sense of commonality.
Of course, in today’s electronic world, meeting places do not necessarily
have to be physical spaces. The development of the Internet has provided a virtual
medium where individuals can effectively interact across boundaries of time and
space. Many of the organizations we have studied have developed (or are in the
process of developing) computer-based tools to support community efforts. These
technologies allow individuals to connect with others to discuss similar work
challenges, capture and share common tools and techniques, conduct real-time
dialogues, solve problems, and introduce outside ideas and influences. Several
organizations have used videoconferencing and other multimedia technologies to
further enrich conversations within the community and closely simulate the face-
to-face environment generated in physical meeting places. Also, while many
organizations are choosing to buy the technologies needed to provide these
Preface ix
places, others have chosen to rent these places from third-party application
service providers (ASPS). Some of these providers even offer management and
maintenance services to meet the community’s collaboration requirements.
Things
Etienne Wenger, a leading expert on the subject of communities in organi-
zations, writes about a critical activity performed within communities: the man-
agement of “boundary objects” or things. In the workplace, these objects are the
rules, norms, procedures, tools, and other artifacts that communities use to
accomplish their tasks. Individuals use these things as mechanisms for document-
ing and sharing what they know and how the work they perform should be
accomplished. For example, a community of information technology project
managers might use documents such as work plans, team member resumes, and
directories of outside experts to capture and transfer the collective knowledge of
the group. Similarly, service personnel might have a series of diagnostic tools and
procedure manuals that are commonly used to solve customer problems. Through
these things, communities provide a vehicle to share their common tools of the
trade, and to the extent possible, codify the less articulated forms of community
knowledge. Individuals within a community relate to these common objects and
use them as vehicles for expanding the collective knowledge of the group.
Through the interaction of people, places, and things, communities help
individuals develop a sense of identity within their organization. This is especially
critical given the cultural changes in modern organizations, such as flextime
workers, telecommuters, and work teams that interact across time and space. As
more and more people “go virtual” and find themselves working with individuals
who they typically do not see on a day-to-day basis, communities fill an important
void. Not only do they help people make connections that are vital to learning
new skills, they also help make sense of the larger environment and provide a
mechanism for sharing critical knowledge across the organization.
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Over the past nine years, academicians, technologists, and management
professionals have written a great deal on knowledge and communities. While
some experts have focused on the theoretical associations of like-minded
people-gathered around common interests or shared contexts-others have
recently highlighted the real-world human potential that exists when communi-
ties are successfully developed and supported within organizations. As a result,
the chapters in this book are organized into two primary sections: Practical
Applications and Theory Development.
The first section, Practical Applications, is designed to provide a broad
survey of recent work focusing on real-world examples of communities in the
X Preface
business world. In Chapter 1, Etienne Wenger describes how communities forge
new connections and relationships through sharing common work practices,
foster a sense of belonging, and deploy an organization’s knowledge strategy.
Keeping with this theme, Richard McDermott highlights how communities play
a critical role in organizing, codifying, and transforming an organization’s
explicit and tacit knowledge. Next, William Judge, Gerald Fyxell, and Robert
Dooley illustrate how communities can foster an environment that supports
creativity and innovation. Importantly, they also highlight the actions managers
can take to maintain these types of cultures.
The next two chapters in the Practical Applications section discuss how
Xerox has applied the use of communities in different parts of the corporation.
David Stamps uses Xerox’s Integrated Customer Service project to demonstrate
how groups of individuals with common sets of interests and expertise can be
used to educate each other in a real-time setting. John Storck and Patricia Hill
then describe the use of “strategic communities” within Xerox as a mechanism
to facilitate knowledge sharing across information technology managers. The
final article in this section goes beyond the organization’s boundaries and dis-
cusses communities of customers. Arthur Armstrong and John Hagel stress that
by providing customers the opportunity to interact with the organization and
with each other, companies can foster deep relationships and brand loyalty.
Further, these customer dialogues can help customize products and services to
meet consumers’ needs and interests. All told, this compilation of practical
applications provides readers with numerous examples of how others have devel-
oped effective community-based approaches.
The second section, Theory Development, provides some of the underlying
theoretical perspectives that support the practical applications in the earlier
chapters. The first chapter in this section, written by John Seely Brown and Paul
Duguid, describes the importance of communities as a vehicle for fostering
organizational learning. In the next work, Eric Lesser and Laurence Prusak focus
on how communities build the social capital necessary to share organizational
knowledge. In another chapter, Jeanne Liedtka states that communities may help
to circumvent the issues within a company that can lead to complacency and
failure by allowing organizations to more easily adapt to environmental and
market change. Robin Teigland uses a case study of a technology firm to illustrate
how individual work performance is influenced by communities and highlights
the importance of knowledge flows across organizational boundaries.
As part of this Theory Development section, Barry Wellman and a number
of colleagues from the Center for Urban and Community Studies at the University
of Toronto examine the use of computer-supported social networks (CSSN).
Their chapter attempts to link the size, structure, and composition of virtual
communities and workgroups to the types of communication that affect telework,
domestic work, and the larger networked organization. In a related study, Vivian
Franco, Hsiao-Yun Hu, Bruce Lewenstein, Roberta Piirto, Ross Underwood, and
Noni Korf Vidal study the effects of electronic communication conflicts and
determine that they can lead to negative as well as positive effects. In the
Preface xi
concluding chapter, Catherine Marshall, Frank Shipman, and Raymond McCall
consider the difficulty of knowledge retrieval given that communities are now
storing their collective thoughts in large-scale electronic libraries. In short, the
Theory Development chapters provide readers with cutting-edge research that
serves as the basis for the chapters in the Practical Application section.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We have been fortunate to work with a number of individuals who have
helped form and shape our views of communities in organizations. The IBM
Institute for Knowledge Management has given us a forum where we have been
able to work with organizations to better understand the use of communities in
the business environment. Laurence Prusak, the Executive Director of the Insti-
tute, has been instrumental in providing support and encouragement for this
effort. We have also been fortunate to work with a number of insightful col-
leagues during our research effort, including Kathleen Curley, Linda Carotenuto,
and Matthew Simpson from Lotus Research, John Storck from Boston University,
and Etienne Wenger. Our long discussions and working sessions have helped
develop a clearer understanding of the topic and its associated challenges and
opportunities.
aQ€J
...
... 1
Communities of Practice: The
Key to Knowledge Strategy‘k
Etienne Wenger
Communities of practice are everywhere. They exist within businesses and
across business units and company boundaries. Even though they are infor-
mally constituted and reside within a specific area of practice, these self-
organizing systems share the capacity to create and use organizational
knowledge through informal learning and mutual engagement. Wenger
believes that communities of practice are key to understanding the complex
knowledge challenges faced by most organizations in today’s knowledge
economy. T o that end, Wenger sets the boundaries of what constitutes a
community of practice and how it resides within different types of organi-
zations. In this chapter, Wenger proposes a framework that motivates firms
to recognize the critical knowledge generated by communities of practice
to engage and identify common work practices, foster belonging, and
deploy a knowledge strategy through transformation. With his framework,
Wenger highlights how communities forge new connections and relation-
ships with the greater organization-where the community is legitimized as
a place for sharing and creating knowledge.
What if the key to the complex knowledge challenges faced by most organizations
today lies in age-old, utterly familiar, and largely informal social structures
known today as communities of practice? How would we “manage” knowledge?
What shape would a knowledge strategy take?
Executives have long understood the value of knowledge and learning, at
least at some intuitive level. More recently, these concerns have come to the fore
with talk of a new economy, knowledge-based organizations, and learning as the
ultimate competitive advantage. But what to do about such elusive, dynamic
processes as learning and knowledge has not been quite so obvious.
* Reprinted with permission from Knowledge Directions: The Journal o f t h e Institute for Knowledge
Management, 1 (Fall 1999): 48-63.
3
4 KNOWLEDGE AND COMMUNITIES
Although most of us appreciate that we have learned as much through
informal processes as in classrooms, we are not sure how to combine informal
and formal aspects of learning in our organizations. And even though most of
us are painfully aware that we know much more than we can ever tell, that
knowledge in practice is much more a living process than an object, we can’t
seem to refrain from treating it as a “thing” when we consider the need to
“manage” it. Typical solutions have ranged from large training departments and
corporate centers of excellence to complex information systems and collections
of knowledge bases on Intranets. All with mixed results. Managers have focused
on these formal efforts, not so much because they necessarily believed these were
ideal or complete solutions, but because such approaches seemed tangible,
justifiable, and amenable to such hallmarks of organizational success as formal
design, implementation, and measurement.
Managers needed to move decisively, but missed a key element-a clear
understanding of the kind of structure that could in practice take responsibility
for learning and knowledge. They had clear structures for other purposes, and
had replaced the silos and ivory towers of traditional functional organizations
with business units-structures they found better suited for focusing on markets
and product lines. More recently, they discovered teams as the ideal structures
for locating the ownership of tasks and projects. But what about the ownership
of knowledge? Where should it be located? What was going to be the new
structure to take on this responsibility?
The answer to this very contemporary organizational question lies in an
age-old structure. Since the beginning of history, human beings have formed
communities that accumulate collective learning into social practices-commu-
nities of practice.’ Tribes are an early example. More recent instances include the
guilds of the Middle Ages that took on the stewardship of a trade, and scientific
communities that collectively define what counts as valid knowledge in a specific
area of investigation. Less obvious cases could be your local magician club, nurses
in a ward, a street gang, or a group of software engineers meeting regularly in
the cafeteria to share tips. Such communities do not take knowledge in their
specialty to be an object; it is a living part of their practice even when they
document it. Knowing is an act of participation.
Communities of practice may well represent the natural social structure for
the ownership of knowledge, but they have been around for a long time, and they
are everywhere. Organizations are already full of them. So what is new here? Why
even pay attention? Well, what is new is the need for organizations to become
more intentional and systematic about “managing” knowledge, and therefore the
need to give these age-old structures a new, central role in running a business. A
growing number of leading organizations in the private and public sectors (some
of which are mentioned below) are pioneering this approach. Communities of
practice represent the latest wave in an ongoing evolution of organizational
structures, whose four primary types can be summarized in Figure 1.1.
Because of their informal nature, communities of practice have remained
largely invisible within organizations and have not been part of the language of
Communities of Practice: The Key to Knowledge Strategy 5
TYPE OF DOMINANT DISTINCTIVE DISADVANTAGE
ORGANIZATION STRUCTURE ADVANTAGE
Functional Functional division Concentration of Functional silos with
expertise under internal focus on
hierarchical control specialties rather
than on market
needs and
opportunities
Muti-divisional Business unit Integrates functional Divisional boundaries
expertise to focus on impede learning
business lines and and knowledge
market segments transfer
Project-based Project team Market agility and Short-term focus on
individual tasks, much learning
customer focus is lost or localized
Knowledge-based Community of Integrates the Competing priorities
practice stewarding of for people who
key competencies belong to multiple
into the very structures at once
fabric of the (business unit, team,
organization communities of
practice)
FIGURE 1.1 Four Waves in Organizational Design
management until recently. Now they represent the new frontier for organiza-
tions, the promise of great opportunities for pioneers of the knowledge age. They
must be acknowledged, supported and fully integrated into the operation of
organizations; and all this without disrupting the informality, collegiality, self-
organization, and internal leadership that are critical to their ability to steward
an area of expertise effective1ya2
A KNOWLEDGE STRATEGY
If communities of practice are the natural stewards of knowledge in an
organization, what does a knowledge strategy look like that takes this as its
foundation? What is its overall shape? A knowledge strategy based on commu-
nities of practice consists of seven basic steps grouped into four streams of
activity:
1. Understand strategic knowledge needs: what knowledge is critical to success?
2. Engage practice domains (find communities): where will people form
communities around practices they can engage in and identify with?
3. Develop communities: how to help key communities reach their full
potential?
6 KNOWLEDGE AND COMMUNITIES
Participate in
commercial markets
JilI d
Build the
IP abilities
organizatioi
Participate in 1 b Participate in
social learning systems talent markets
Build a social learning system
FIGURE 1.2 A Knowledge Strategy Based on Communities of Practice
Note that the strategy is not linear. Rather it is an ongoing, dynamic process of renewing the
capabilities of the organization by cycling through these steps. The strategy does not simply start at
step 1 and end at step 7 . Steps can happen in parallel, and every step can be a point of entry into
the whole process. You may start at step 1 mapping the knowledge needs of a business strategy and
the practices required to realize this strategy. But you may also start at step 3 if some people want
to connect better with their peers by forming communities, or at step 4 if some communities need
to learn how to communicate across boundaries. You may even start with a need to foster belonging
in order to solidify your organization and galvanize it around its mission. No matter where you start,
eventually you will need to have the whole wheel rolling.
4. Work the boundaries: how to link communities into broader learning systems?
5 . Foster belonging: how to engage people’s identities and sense of meaning?
6. Run the business: how to integrate communities of practice into running the
business of the organization?
7 . Apply, assess, reflect, and renew: how to deploy a knowledge strategy through
waves of organizational transformation?
The overall structure of this knowledge strategy is represented in Figure
1.2. The first six steps are paired in three curved arrows that represent three
streams of activity, with the fourth in the center keeping the momentum of the
