Note: This article appeared in Intranet Professional prior to its relaunch as Intranets (in 2004).
Communities of practice can play a vital role in any organization, but their greatest value comes when they are leveraged for the strategic capabilities they can generate. A planned approach to community development that includes a technology infrastructure to support collaboration and learning is key to creating the value proposition for the organization, the community members, and the practice at large.
Communities of Practice Come of Age
An age-old structure that can be compared to medieval guilds, master-apprenticeship environments, or mentoring relationships, communities of practice have entered the spotlight as organizations realize the potential of these naturally forming groups of people who exchange ideas either formally or informally to better their performance.
The emerging knowledge era presents challenges to every aspect of how our society and economy function. With advancements in technology fueling rapid change, people seek out other people in like situations to make sense of change, to collaborate in finding solutions to new problems—basically to share their expertise in order to create new knowledge.
First identified in the early 1990s by Etienne Wenger and Jean Lave, communities of practice have undergone an amazing amount of study in the last decade. Corporations from every industry sector, government and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), as well as not-for-profit organizations are all finding the value in cultivating informal, grassroots communities and supporting structured, strategic communities. A quick look at any conference program or business bookshelf related to knowledge and learning shows the intense interest in understanding communities and leveraging their potential.
Success comes most often to community of practice programs that are situated within an organization's comprehensive knowledge strategy, in learning organizations that value their knowledge assets and understand the need for developing strategic capabilities. Key to this value proposition is harnessing the potential for collaboration that most likely already exists within an organization's technology infrastructure.
It's All About Capabilities
Customer and market-driven demands have forced organizations to develop strategies that often exceed the limits of existing internal structures and knowledge assets. The new focus is on creating a distinctive set of individual and organizational capabilities that will help the organization meet its goals. These capabilities link the organization's strategy with its ability to perform. They enable the organization's success, no matter how it's measured—in share price, market share, service quality, and/or customer satisfaction.
Capabilities play a central role in realizing strategy through performance. Fueling capability generation is the collaboration and learning that takes place in communities of practice.
Developing Communities
In the fall of 1999, at the former Clarica Life Insurance Company (now merged with Sun Life Financial), we made a third attempt at designing an approach for developing a sustainable strategic community—a community that would be supported by the organization but governed and managed by the community itself. With a cross-functional group led by members of the knowledge team, we established the Advisor Network as a pilot project—a research bed to analyze the concerted effort of community building within a community of financial planners and insurance agents.
A community development process model was identified after the initial phase of the pilot project—a model that has subsequently been used to establish additional strategic communities and sustain the initial community well past its second anniversary.
Community Development Process Model
The community development process model consists of two main phases. Phase I covers the initial development of the project through to the point of making the community available to its members. It focuses on the design and implementation of the logistics of community development—putting in place the foundation pieces on which the community is built.
In Phase II of the community development process, the community moves from a focus on creating the community vessel to a focus on creating value in the community—value to its members, the community, and the organization.
Phase I: Community Design and Launch
The three-step preparation for launch was accomplished with the active involvement of a project manager, a steering group, and a team of resource people from across the organization.
Step 1. Define the Community Project—In the first step of creating the community, the community project is defined by establishing boundaries (sponsorship, scope, milestones) and setting the context (identifying the business need, understanding the practice environment, and characterizing the knowledge-sharing culture). A steering group is created, the project management approach is defined, roles and responsibilities are outlined, and the project plan is generated, including the resources required for the technology infrastructure and the project deliverables.
Step 2. Establish Community Components—In the second step, the community foundation is outlined: the infrastructure, tools, processes, and procedures that will facilitate the community's interaction and collaboration. The foundation creates the space where discussions and activities take place. It organizes and makes accessible the community's knowledge. The following eight foundation components were identified in this step:
- Governance—the structures needed to guide policy and process development and to make decisions about the community's purpose, directions, and approaches
- Membership—the selection criteria and invitation process
- Technology Infrastructure—the application chosen to support community development and knowledge sharing; the collaborative tool used to support the virtual community
- User Support—the help desk issues and solutions needed to ensure access to the community and usability of the application
- Content—the personal data for member profiles and seed content that will populate the community at launch and during the initial community development stages
- Education—the materials and resources to familiarize community members with accessing and using the application
- Facilitation—the moderator, guide, cheerleader, and traffic cop who ensure the smooth exchange of ideas, nurture community building, and provide liaison with stakeholders and the application vendor
- Communications—the public relations activities to promote the use of the community as well as to keep sponsors, senior management, community members, and Clarica members informed of the community's development process
Step 3. Launch the Community—In the last step of Phase I, the Web-based application that supports the community's online activity is made available to the members during a facilitated ramp-up period when members are encouraged to edit their profiles and familiarize themselves with the site's functionality. At this point, the project manager's role diminishes and the facilitator's role increases as the community members are welcomed and the tone for the community's practice is established. Just before the community's site is made available, sponsor sign-off (permission to proceed with the community launch) is obtained, site readiness (technology, member profiles, relevant content) is reviewed, and member readiness (education and Web awareness) is assessed. Key to the launch is a focus not on the technology, but on building a sense of community for the members through the leadership of the core membership group and master facilitation.
Phase II: Community Implementation and Growth
In Phase II, the community itself is now the process driver, not the project plan as was the case in Phase I. The members are focused on creating a sense of community and creating value. During this phase, the community matures through a continuous cycle of development, evaluation, and growth with the support of a facilitator. As new ideas or situations are presented, they are evaluated and accepted as is or modified, discarded, or expanded upon. A collective voice begins to form as the community's personality emerges.
The members now take responsibility for the community. In Phase I, most decisions are made by a handful of people, and the project manager tightly controls the process. Now the community members are the drivers: A core of community leaders and champions emerges and a rhythm of community participation is established.
Step 4. Establish the Community. The early days of the community's implementation are spent just getting to know who is in the community and testing out the functionality of the community site. Profiles are filled out and members begin to find similarities in business situations. Facilitation continues to play a key role in helping members see the benefits of their participation and ensuring that the community site is functioning properly. Individual needs and contribution styles of members are identified, and an expertise network begins to develop. Members participate in various activities that are focused on areas of interest and build on the functionality of the community's collaborative tool.
Step 5. Checkpoint: Assess Community Progress and Value. Rather than waiting for a postmortem on a serious issue that may challenge the community's viability, an informal assessment takes place. A permanent channel for feedback is established and assessment routines are implemented. Examples include collection of informal comments made in dialogues and e-mails; consultation with steering group members and project sponsors on issues and opportunities; and analysis of usage statistics generated by the community's collaborative tool.
Step 6. Grow the Community. The community is now in high gear. Members are addressing their individual needs, which in turn contributes to the aggregate value of the community as the network of expertise, and new knowledge is generated through collaboration. Synchronous and asynchronous conversations are the primary channels for creating new knowledge, exchanging existing knowledge, and outlining ways to utilize knowledge capital. Increasing individual and organizational capabilities is the focus of this step. And knowledge capital is generated within the community through a variety of community-sponsored activities and the continuous exchange of ideas in threaded discussions and synchronous chats. The community's value proposition is realized through problem-solving discussions, identification of an expertise network, and harvesting knowledge for reuse.
Step 7. Evaluate Purpose and Direction. Initial assumptions about the community's value proposition as identified by the sponsors, the steering group, and the members form the basis for the evaluation. While informal comments have been collected throughout the earlier steps of the development process, a formal evaluation is now completed to test the value proposition to the community membership, identify areas for improvement, and make recommendations for expanding the community. The evaluation follows a formal research approach: Design a data-collection tool, gather and analyze data, state findings and make recommendations, and then communicate the results.
Step 8. Expand the Community. The recommendations are tabled with the steering group and a summary is developed for the sponsors. Approaches for expanding the community through increasing the membership and creating subcommunities are based on an evaluation of the recommendations and input from the community membership. A plan is developed for achieving the community's expansion, and work begins on realizing its goals.
Community Architecture
Along with a development process, attention to the community's architecture is key to its success—its ability to expand the richness of its value proposition. Current demands on most organizations mean that a community's collaborative space must be accessed via multiple channels. The virtual space needs to be complimented by opportunities to meet face-to-face, on the telephone, and/or by e-mail. To support the many different kinds of conversations that will take place, the organization needs to provide the community with a variety of tools and approaches to maximize the opportunity for knowledge creation, access, and exchange. The foundation of a community's architecture is the technology infrastructure that supports collaboration and learning.
Given the often geographically dispersed membership, demands on people's schedules, and the sheer volume of online resources used to inform collaboration, leveraging technology will make a significant difference in the value proposition of most communities.
At the heart of a community is easy access to conversations—the lifeblood of knowledge creation and use in any community. Whether exchanging ideas in threaded discussions, brainstorming or problem-solving sessions, or online chats or accessing the community's storehouse of knowledge objects in repositories, galleries, or photo albums, the organization's intranet plays a key role in supporting the community's work.
At Sun Life Financial, we have a variety of tools to support communities. Dedicated community applications, resource materials for community architects, toolkits for community coordinators and facilitators, and knowledge objects to support productive inquiries are all accessible via the corporate intranet. As our ability to leverage our technology infrastructure increases, the sophistication of our community development program also increases.
A Maturity Model for Communities and Technology
We've seen technology move through an amazing maturation process. From the early focus on collecting and storing data, technology soon provided us with the functionality to interact with data, to order and compile it in a systematic way to generate reports and produce information about transactions. What we're seeing now is the ability to support collaborative functions through teams and communities that span an organization's multisite structures and cross-functional approaches. We're now moving toward fully leveraging technology for building the strategic capabilities—both individual and organizational—that we need to achieve our goals.
We can overlay the technology maturity model with another model that traces the development of a sophisticated community strategy from the sporadic existence of informal communities to the integration of communities as an integral organizational structure.
It's clear that the increased integration of collaborative technologies within the organization's infrastructure fuels the ability to learn and collaborate—the key capabilities needed to generate all other individual and organizational capabilities. Communities of practice that leverage technology enable their organizations to innovate at the speed necessary to meet customer and market demands and embrace the changes brought by the knowledge era.
The Value Proposition of Communities
A community of practice is a complex structure. Often compared to sophisticated systems such as the human body, a beehive, or the physical form of communities in which we live and work, the richness of a community's value proposition is extensive.
The strategic nature of communities stems from their ability to systematically enhance the performance of the organization. In this context, communities are no longer a tool to deal with a specific challenge in a particular area or discipline; they become an integral element of a high-performance organization's fabric.
The ability to form different kinds of communities that are highly effective at using virtual tools to collaborate and overcome challenges can enhance any organization's capabilities. With a careful plan that leverages an organization's investment in its technology infrastructure, communities have the potential to transform the organization and make it viable as we move squarely into the knowledge era.