APQC’s Knowledge Management Blog is written by Farida Hasanali. It is relatively new, only a few months old, perhaps less known, but shows great promise. Farida has been with APQC for the past 10 years and has been involved in many knowledge management related projects. This blog has been created to enable APQC to share its lessons learned.
One of the first things that struck me was the informal, conversational tone that Farida uses. This is certainly the goal of most blogs but she is especially good at letting you feel like you are looking over her shoulder at APQC activities or engaging in a conversation.
The most recent series of posts focus on communities of practice. They provide context for a number of the white papers on the topic that are available through APQC, many of which are free, such as Building and Sustaining Communities of Practice as well as others like Creating a Value Proposition for KM, and APQC's Road Map to Knowledge Management Results: Stages of Implementation.
I have used the stages of implementation featured in the third document on a number of engagements. In one case, we were able to use it to point on that the organization was moving to create an infrastructure before they had established the value of knowledge management for the enterprise. With this mis-step they were potentially setting up the wrong infrastructure, one that would have to be re-assembled later.
Farida discusses three types of communities:
“When we conducted our study on Building and Sustaining Communities of Practice we found a trend in the types of communities that organizations typically have. The three types are helping communities, best-practice communities, and innovation communities.
Helping communities exist in all our organizations. They consist of people helping one another when needed. You could call them your social network. The only difference between a helping community is that its intra-organization whereas a social network crosses organizational boundaries. Of course helping communities can cross organizational boundaries too but in its simplest form its employees (interested in the same topic area or having expertise in a topic areas) informally helping one another.
A best-practice community is a slightly advanced helping community. In a best-practice community, the members not only share tips with one another but make an effort to capture and reuse lessons learned and best-practices uncovered during regular work or special projects. These communities require a bit more formality. They typically have a leader, someone who helps with categorizing the information, maybe some meetings, and some of the member's time is formally allocated to community activities.
An innovation community typically stewards its body of knowledge. If the organization makes cars, then a "brakes" community would be in charge of knowing everything there is to know about brakes on a car. That means that when a new car is being designed, the designers would contact the "brakes' community to find out what types of brakes would work best on the new car. Participation in this type of community is typically not voluntary and working collaboratively is a large part of the community member's job.
These communities are not exclusive of one another. A helping community can morph into a best-practice community, or a best-practice community can morph into an innovation community. It is however not required that communities change. They can stay at the same stage they began in as long as the needs of the members are being met.
Most organizations have several different types of communities at the same time.”
Naturally, blogs can support all three types of communities. I have subscribed to the APQC blog and look forward to receiving more.
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