How Do Communities Work in Leading Organizations?
Below
are descriptions of the CoP strategies and programs at select best-practice
organizations. For more information on some of these enterprises
and their communities of practice, see APQC's 2005
best practices report Using Communities of Practice to
Drive Organizational Performance and Innovation.
Accenture
Accenture provides global
management, consulting, and outsourcing services to more than 150 locations
across 50 countries.
Communities
of practice have been a part of Accenture's KM approach since the mid-1990s.
There are currently 150 existing communities at various stages of maturity; all
of them use SharePoint with blog and wiki capabilities. The organization's
knowledge-sharing application, the Knowledge Exchange, has more than 100,000
contributed items containing more than 300,000 attachments and topic pages.
Accenture reports that its Knowledge Exchange system has reduced yearly
spending on application operations by more than $2 million.
Air Products and Chemicals Inc.
Air Products and Chemicals Inc. (APCI) is a Fortune 500
company serving customers in the technology, energy, health care, and
industrial markets. It offers a unique portfolio of products, services, and
solutions, providing atmospheric gases, process and specialty gasses, performance
materials, and chemical intermediates.
APCI is recognized for its innovative culture, operational
excellence, and commitment to safety and the environment. Its employees build
lasting relationships with their customers and communities based on
understanding, integrity, and passion. Customer relationships are the organization's
differentiator in the marketplace, and this customer commitment characterizes
how APCI employees spend their time. In short, they talk to each other a lot.
These personal interactions form the organizational platform for CoPs.
Over the past decade, APCI has translated this type of ad
hoc networking into more formal, sustainable behavior by providing a CoP structure
that aligns with the organizational culture and facilitates the accomplishment
of personal and corporate goals. APCI has a single community framework with
three types of communities: communities of interest, communities of practice,
and centers of excellence. Currently, APCI has 30 active communities of
interest, primarily related to technical subjects. It also has 79 active
communities of practice and 20 active centers of excellence. The communities of
practice generally fall into one of three categories: technology, best practices
sharing, and new ideas. Approximately 27 percent of the work force participates
in one or more communities, and a core KM group provides support and structure
to the CoP effort.
Arup Group Limited
Arup Group Limited is an engineering, architectural, and
planning services organization. Its mission is to "shape a better world." One
of Arup's strategic drivers for communities came from its founder Sir Ove Arup,
who encouraged employees to create a "composite mind" because he felt that the
field of possibilities could not be surveyed in a single mind. Other strategic
drivers relate market challenges: Arup is facing global competition and has realized
that, in order to respond to market changes and be agile, it has to optimize
knowledge transfer and leverage knowledge to drive its business. Arup
accomplishes this through innovative solutions delivered by the organization's
global knowledge and skills networks (communities of practice), which focus on
bringing together a variety of people with diverse skills and backgrounds and
mobilizing them to converge on solutions.
Arup's 40 networks are structured
around the organization's disciplines and business domains. These formal and
informal networks vary greatly: The largest has approximately 1,000 members,
but many of the more informal networks have only 10 to 20 members.
Caterpillar, Inc.
Caterpillar, Inc. is the world's No. 1
producer of earthmoving machinery and a leading supplier of agricultural
equipment.
The organization's strategic driver for
communities was just-in-time learning. In the past, Caterpillar employees
attended in-class training on topics they might or might not find relevant to
their daily jobs. By constrast, CoPs provide a platform through which employees
can obtain timely answers to current issues or problems. Communities at
Caterpillar are very narrowly focused in order to maintain a direct
relationship between community activities and daily work. Communities are a way
for Caterpillar employees to connect with the organization's global partners,
customers, or teams in a virtual environment.
Caterpillar currently has approximately
3,500 CoPs with about 40,000 unique participants. Approximately 7,000
Caterpillar dealers also participate in the organization's CoPs.
Ernst & Young
Ernst & Young (E&Y) is one of the world's largest
accounting firms, offering auditing and accounting services around the globe.
The strategic driver for E&Y's communities was
directly related to the organization's core business. Its consultants needed to
be educated about the issues that its clients face and know where to find
solutions to those issues. Although the required knowledge existed within the organization,
it wasn't accessible or organized. The realization that content needed to be
identified and organized led the organization to create a Center for Business
Knowledge, which became responsible for identifying communities that would be
able to submit and transfer relevant content.
Ernst & Young's investment in knowledge has proven to
be value-added; the firm has been able to grow revenue without growing
headcount. By accessing and leveraging the firm's CoPs, new hires and
experienced hires are able to immediately inculcate the firm's policies,
procedures, and methodologies.
Federal
Highway
The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), established in
1893, is a major agency of the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT). FHWA
has its headquarters in
The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) is a major
agency of the U.S. Department of Transportation. FHWA's main strategic
objective is neither saving money nor increasing operational efficiency: It is
the noble goal of saving lives. The agency's overall ambition is to reduce
transportation fatalities by 20 percent.
Exchanging knowledge with its partners (e.g., state transportation
departments, metropolitan planning organizations, and industry associations) is
one of FHWA's primary means to improve transportation. In order to exchange
knowledge, the agency conducts highway R&D, regulation interpretation, and
technical assistance (e.g., sharing good practices from state to state, moving
R&D into practice, and training and education).
FHWA has 20 CoPs of various sizes covering more than 140
critical business topics. Some of FHWA's CoPs are customer- or partner-facing,
which means that they are open to federal, state, and local governments as well
as academia, nonprofit, and industry members. One example of an active customer
CoP is the Re:NEPA community, which is focused on the National Environmental
Policy Act. Internally focused communities, on the other hand, are accessible only
to FHWA staff.
Fluor Corporation
Fluor Corporation is one of the world's largest publicly
owned engineering, procurement, construction, and maintenance services
companies.
Like many other advanced COP users, Fluor is facing
radical changes in the "way business is done."
Global projects, competition, work force scarcity and lack of mobility,
mergers and acquisitions (fewer clients), and the need to minimize job-site
time are some of the drivers behind Fluor's CoPs. The organization can meet its
overall goal--to provide value to clients--only by integrating and leveraging the
collective intellectual capital of its employees, thereby enhancing their skill
sets and improving business performance.
Fluor began implementing its CoP initiative in 1999 and currently
operates 38 knowledge communities. Knowledge communities are divided into two
categories: functional communities (such as finance, HR, IT, and procurement) and
industry communities (which focus on the diverse industries that Fluor serves,
such as life sciences, government, and oil and gas). Overall, Fluor's communities have approximately 14,000 members from 90
different locations, which represent nearly half of the employee population.