Knowledge management in CoP: 2007

Encouraging research through Communities of Practice.

Sharing Knowledge - The Process

Sharing knowledge is not only about the process of transferring information between members in a community, but rather it helps researchers in some CoPs to extend their research process and gain knowledge in expanding their research outcomes through exchanging ideas and thoughts with different researchers. Most importantly, researchers gain confidence in starting the process of publishing their research through their interaction in CoPs.

This kind of sharing knowledge is a give and take process between members of CoPs. In other words, knowledge is managed by sharing it with the community’s members.

This article reminds me of one of my colleagues who became depressed because he tried many times recently to publish some of his research but each time, it was rejected. In my opinion, if he could join one of these CoPs that has been referred to in this article, that would definitely help him in critiquing his submission, and others who have faced similar obstacles would perhaps, be able to share their experience and hopefully, together they could suggest some salient solutions to their problems in publishing their research.

This is an example of how Knowledge management encourages members in CoPs to search for solutions to some technical problems as well as share similar problems and desired outcomes. Hopefully members will find solution and be able to start to write their research and successfully publish it.

So, do you think as a member of a CoP, you would be better able to write a research paper with the support of new members you have met in this community? Will you let them help you by sharing their comments, criticisms, thoughts and ideas to solve some problems related to your research.

For all my colleagues in USQ, you can have access to this article easily through USQ library, the Encyclopedia of Communities of Practice. I hope that you will be able to access this interesting article. My deepest apology for the rest for not having any direct link for this article. Comments are invited and appreciated :)

Regards,

Laila

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Corlett, S.; Bryans, P. & Mavin, S. (2006). Encouraging research through Communities of Practice. Encyclopedia of Communities of Practice in Information and Knowledge Management. Idea Group Reference. pp. 157-162

Information transfer in CoPs

Knowledge Management and Communities of Practice: an experience from Rabobank Australia and New Zealand.

This article is very interesting to understand the relationship between Knowledge management and communities of practice. Although it’s an experience from Rabobank Australia and New Zealand, it has defined and referred to the strong relationship between knowledge management and communities of practice. The following summarizes the most important point of this article:

Knowledge management is a collective term for the facilitation of improvements to an organization’s capabilities, efficiencies and competitive advantage through the better use of its individual and collective knowledge and information resources. Knowledge management has become one of the most important key drivers that re-emergence communities of practice.

One of the important saying about knowledge management in the article according to Davenport and Prusak (1995), contend that: “Knowledge is a fluid mix of framed experience, values, contextual information, and expert insight that provides a framework for evaluating and incorporating new experience and information. It originates and is applied in the minds of knowers”.

This article has refers to information transfer as the increasing link in community knowledge and information. Therefore, in CoP, the knowledge management is the process of transferring and exchanging ideas, information, and experience between the members of the community. Besides, CoP can exist whenever there is a will to share information and experiences in helpful, like-minded community.

If you are a member in any CoP, how do you think the knowledge is transferred and shared between members?

Any thoughts?

Laila

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Knowledge Management and Communities of Practice: an experience from Rabobank Australia and New Zealand. Paper presented by Brad Hinton (Rabobank Australia) to the IAMA.World Food and Agribusiness Symposium, Cancun, Mexico, June 20-21 2003. Retrieved 1/12/2007 at: http://www.ifama.org/conferences/2003Conference/papers/hinton.pdf

Hard and Soft Knowledge

Communities of Practice: Going Virtual

by Kimble, C., Hildreth, P. and Wright, P

When we read about Knowledge management in CoP, we will find these two terms, Hard and Soft Knowledge. Hard knowledge is the one that exist and we learn it from books, internet resources and experts, but soft knowledge is the one that we can contribute in creating and forming it in CoP. This article has focus in Soft Knowledge in CoPs and how it began to exist. Telling a story we have it from our own lives as an experience and share it with others to arrive at solution to that problem that itself is a soft knowledge. Over time, that solution was passed around with other technicians and became part of the community’s stock knowledge. This knowledge is codified and stored to share it with others who may have the same problem in future in different time. There are three methods of Soft knowledge that exist in CoPs as the following:

First: The gathering of domain knowledge (for example, how to solve a particular tricky problem as I mentioned above that it starts by telling a story of the problem).

Second: the construction of knowledge of work practices specific to the community (for example, knowledge of the idiosyncrasies of an individual machine and how they are catered for)

Finally, there is the knowledge that the community constructs about the competencies of its members (for example, through the appraisal of their told stories)

What do you think about Soft Knowledge? Do you think it’s helpful to use in CoPs? Is it effective to use the same experience and solutions for some members of the same community but from earlier time in that community?

Regards,

Laila

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Kimble, C., Hildreth, P. and Wright, P. (2000) ‘Communities of practice: going virtual’, in KnowledgeManagement and Business Model Innovation, Chapter 13, pp. 220–234, Idea Group Publishing, Hershey (USA)/London (UK). Retrived 10/12/2007 athttp://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~kimble/research/13kimble.pdf

What's KM stratgey in CoP?

Knowledge management as a doughnut: Shaping your knowledge Strategy through communities of practice.

By Etienne Wenger

In this article, it has been realized recently the importance of communities of practices as a social fabric of knowledge. How can we define knowledge management in communities of practice? Knowledge itself is what our human communities have accumulated over time to understand the world and act effectively in it. But what about the term “management”? Wenger in this article tried to define what do we mean by management and it is mostly related with the practitioners who run the knowledge in the communities of practice. The term “management” is to take care of, or looking after something. When it comes to have the term management with knowledge, it’s about managing knowledge by sharing it with others.

Knowledge management is a strategic activity. It starts with strategy and ends with strategy. There are strategies that should be followed to implement Knowledge management in CoPs as the following:

The first step in knowledge management is to translate the strategy of the organization into a set of domains of knowledge. A domain breaks down the problem into chunks that are manageable by those who should be managing knowledge, the practitioners.
Cultivate the communities according to each domain.
Engage practitioners in the development of their practice.
Translate the learning inherent in activities into refined practices.
Broaden the scope of learning beyond its source.
Think about knowledge strategically.

To conclude this article, it’s very important to make sure that the community has the resources it needs to function and that its ideas and proposals find their way into the organization. The role of management is to make it possible for practitioners to act as managers of their knowledge.

Regards,

Laila

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Wenger, E. (2004). Knowledge management as a doughnut: Shaping your knowledge strategy through communities of practice. Ivey Business Journal, (January/February 2004), 1-8