Key Findings About Communities
Below are eight key findings from APQC's extensive research on communities of practice.
Finding No. 1
When deciding what communities of practice to support, best-practice organizations make strategic selections based on importance to the business and business opportunities.
Communities can be categorized according to their primary business intent. Possibilities include:
- to provide a forum through which community members can help each other solve everyday work problems;
- to develop and disseminate best practices, guidelines, and procedures for community members;
- to organize, manage, and steward a body of knowledge from which community members can draw; and
- to innovate and create breakthrough ideas, knowledge, and practices.
Most communities serve more than one of these purposes, but a primary intent usually dominates the choices made regarding community design, implementation, and support. For example, a technical community whose intent is to develop and steward a body of knowledge related to a particular discipline will have different processes than a community whose chief goal is to help members collaborate and help one another. The majority of organizations support more than one type of CoP.
Finding No. 3
Although senior leadership support for communities is important, such support does not guarantee that CoPs will be active and sustained. Management is instrumental in selecting topics for communities, ensuring that CoPs are aligned with business objectives and opportunities, and securing resources and funding. However, once communities are deployed, the most important factor in ensuring success is the skill and enthusiasm of the community leader. Management can hamper or kill a community strategy, but it cannot make communities thrive.
Leading organizations support for their communities by providing content managers and systems, community coordinators, and IT applications. Models for support and funding vary, in part because different types of communities require different resources. All communities depend on some central resources--especially at the beginning--for consulting, training, and content management. Business units typically underwrite the personnel costs of leader, expert, and member participation. Once communities are fully established, the business units usually underwrite the central costs through direct billing or overhead allocation. Communities are often included in the budgeting and planning process as a regular feature.
Finding No. 5
In order to become institutionalized, communities must be connected to the official organization. Although CoPs tend to be boundary-spanning entities, their support structures are often tightly linked to and integrated with the frameworks of the organizations in which they reside. This provides legitimacy and necessary connections to management support, funding, and shared resources. At most best-practice organizations, CoPs are formally sponsored by a KM council, a steering committee, or business management.
Finding No. 6
Even at organizations with mature CoP programs, engagement strategies vary greatly. In some instances, membership in communities is purely voluntary; in others, participation is either strongly encouraged or mandatory.
Finding No. 7
Communities tend to be member-driven and democratic in nature--especially when compared to formal organizational structures, which are usually more rigid and hierarchical.
Finding No. 8
When it comes to evaluating the success of CoPs, efforts tend to revolve around two measurement categories: assessing health and measuring impact. Appropriate measures are a direct reflection of the type of community being assessed. Organizations that receive desired results from their communities have either institutionalized CoPs or are in the process of expanding their programs.