Communities of Practice: Overview

APQC defines communities of practice (CoPs) as designated networks of people who share information and knowledge. Community members exchange ideas, collaborate, and learn from one another in both face-to-face and virtual environments. Each CoP is held together by a common goal and desire to share experiences, insights, and best practices related to a topic or discipline using collective norms and processes. Often, communities are accountable for capturing best practices and stewarding bodies of knowledge on behalf of organizations. Many such CoPs have charters and expected business outcomes. However, the way in which communities are defined and structured in specific organizations may vary depending on the enterprise's terminology, philosophy, and circumstances.
Because of their power to enable organizational knowledge flows and enhance performance, APQC has studied communities of practice intensely since 2000. In addition to performing research and uncovering best practices, we've helped dozens of organizations design and implement their own communities.

APQC has compelling evidence that communities (sometimes called networks) are assuming a pivotal role in knowledge work and KM systems, acting as boundary-spanning units responsible for finding and sharing best practices, stewarding knowledge, and helping members work better. Communities are becoming increasingly important because they nurture and harness the raw material of this millennium--knowledge--in the service of the organization. It is not surprising that communities are central to successful KM initiatives and knowledge intensive organizations.
The defining feature of communities is that they transcend boundaries created by workflow, functions, geography, and time. In the modern, knowledge-based, global organization, communities create a channel for knowledge to flow across such boundaries.

Another defining feature of communities is that they provide the means to translate local know-how into collective information and promote standardization of practices across operations and regions. Although a less tangible feature, CoPs also strengthen the social fabric of organizations--a fabric that may have been worn thin by geography and size. Through communities, people converge around common business interests and form relationships that provide social support, excitement, and personal validation. Members collaborate, use one another as sounding boards, teach each other, and strike out together to explore new subject matter.

Through its extensive research, APQC has found that:
• communities are helping organizations communicate and execute their strategy and refine their competencies;
• communities are seen as providing the speed and enabling the innovation needed for marketplace leadership and positioning;
• communities are integrated into the fabric of the organizations' core work and value chains;
• organizations are adopting the strategy of aligning their communities more closely with their formal governance structures;
• tools and methods for community building and management have matured and become a central competency with their own "center of excellence;" and
• managers, executives, and subject matter experts are personally engaged in sustaining communities.

Numerous findings and statistics from APQC's studies attest to the deep penetration of communities into the mainstream of many organizations. CoPs are:

• included in budgeting and planning processes,
• seen as a legitimate way to spend time,
• engaging an amazing percentage of employees,
• held accountable for producing and stewarding business-critical knowledge (and often results), and
• assuming a formal voice in organizations based on the power of the knowledge they create and steward.

The following are more specific findings from APQC's 2005 best practices report Using Communities of Practice to Drive Organizational Performance and Innovation. This report is based on a consortium benchmarking study that examined best practices from leading organizations, including Air Products and Chemicals, Arup, Ernst & Young, the Federal Highway Administration, and Fluor Corporation.

• At the best-practice organizations, over 60 percent of salaried employees are members of at least one community; for many positions, CoP membership is central to career progression.
• Over 80 percent of communities at the best-practice organizations are global in composition.
• Overall sponsorship of the best-practice organizations' CoP programs is shared between a central sponsor and sponsors in specific business divisions. The corporate executive sponsor is usually responsible for overall KM initiatives.
• Management has a strong role in selecting and forming CoPs at the best-practice organizations. This is further evidence of the importance of CoPs in executing the strategy and building capability over the long term.
• Regarding funding for communities at the best-practice organizations, an average of 59 percent comes from business units, whereas 41 percent comes from corporate.
• Community membership becomes part of the fabric of other initiatives and strategies, including project team work, continuous improvement programs, and training.

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.

Finding No. 2
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.

Finding No. 4
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.

A Framework for Designing and Implementing CoPs

APQC has developed an organizing framework for an enterprise-wide approach to communities. This framework provides best practices across the entire CoP life cycle, from planning and positioning a community program to designing, launching, and sustaining effective communities.
Strategic Positioning
Strategic positioning for communities revolves around three elements essential to a successful enterprise-wide approach: a link to key business strategies, the formation of a core group to manage and deploy the CoP strategy, and a model for funding. The strongest strategic position for a CoP program is at the sweet spot of business drivers (strategy), pain points (need), and passion (support).

APQC has found that the most effective communities are woven deeply into the fabric of the organization: functionally, by discipline, and by strategic issue. Most firms have established and positioned a formal core KM or community "center of excellence" with enterprise-wide scope whose charter is to promote CoP consistency, health, and economies of scale. In addition, APQC has found that business units and functions are assuming a major role in funding communities.

CoP Planning
Sometimes preceding strategic positioning is specific CoP planning, which builds the relationships, assessments, and business case for communities. Planning is also instrumental in engaging IT and other stakeholders in the process. Best-practice organizations use an explicit link to business strategy as a key criterion for determining which communities to support. Innovation--an important business objective for most companies--is also used as a criterion for establishing communities. Although creating innovation solutions or service lines is a key function of many communities, there is still a strong focus on sharing best practices, producing and refining documentation, and capturing lessons learned.

Design and Launch
The tools and methods for successfully designing and launching CoPs have become robust and repeatable. The roles of the community leaders and coordinators are more defined and more explicitly supported with training and mentoring.
Just as organizations have gone global, so have their communities. This means that technological, language, and cultural differences may need to be addressed.

Sustain and Evolve
Processes for sustaining and evolving communities have become robust, repeatable, efficient, and effective. Best-practice organizations recommend assessing community alignment with business and CoP goals annually. Most leading firms do not rely solely on automated tools for community metrics. Instead, they go to the source--the people--to determine what works, what doesn't, and what should be changed; they then calibrate this qualitative data with activity measurements from the system. APQC recommends using a combination of member satisfaction measures, knowledge-sharing activity measures, process measures, and business outcomes to assess the value of investments in communities.

Best-practice organizations use their measurement systems and tools to help manage the ongoing processes of communities. By watching leading indicators such as content "freshness," member participation, and "hits" on community Web pages, the CoP support groups can intervene quickly when problems arise. Finally, these groups also use their measurement tools and health assessments to determine when a CoP has run its natural course and warrants decommissioning.

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 Administration
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 Washington, D.C. with geographically dispersed locations (offices) across the United States. Two-thirds of its offices are outside of the Washington, D.C. area. FHWA has many customers including citizens, businesses, the U.S. Congress, and its state partners who are responsible for building, owning, and maintaining the roads. While its programs are growing, FHWA has half the employees of 20 years ago, declining from a high of 4,295 employees in 1980 to 2,645 in 2000.
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.

Evaluate Your Communities: 10 Traits of Successful CoPs

The following is a short diagnostic that can be used to evaluate the design and implementation of communities of practice. The questions are based on 10 traits of successful CoPs that APQC has found to be the most important.

Trait No. 1
A successful CoP has a compelling, clear business value proposition for all involved.

Related Questions
• What value does belonging to and participating in the CoP have for an individual?
• What value does it bring my department if one of my staff takes time to participate?

Trait No. 2
A successful CoP has a dedicated, skilled facilitator or leader.

Related Questions
• Does the CoP leader have the skills to facilitate an organic, outside-the-lines responsibility group?
• Does the CoP leader have a vision for moving the CoP forward?

Trait No. 3
A successful CoP has a coherent, comprehensive knowledge map for its core content.

Related Questions
• Does the group call on frequently used content, topics, or knowledge that should be pulled into one shared space?
• Do all members of the community understand who the sources and recipients of knowledge are within the community?

Trait No. 4
A successful CoP has an outlined, easy-to-follow knowledge sharing process.

Related Questions
• Do people know how, what, and when to share?
• Are community members able to access and reuse knowledge from others or a shared space easily?

Trait No. 5
A successful CoP has an appropriate technology vehicle to facilitate knowledge exchange, knowledge retrieval, and collaboration.

Related Questions
• Does the technology include a repository of community content and/or knowledge?
• Is the technology supported by the organization's IT group?
• Does the technology meet the needs of the user group--in other words, did they have input into the look, feel, and content?

Trait No. 6
A successful CoP has communication and training plans for members and others outside the community.

Related Questions
• Do existing community members (and prospective members) understand why they should participate? Are they aware of "success stories" and the mechanics of the CoP?
• Is there a self-service training module or short program that shows individuals how to share and find knowledge?

Trait No. 7
A successful CoP has an updated, dynamic roster of CoP members.

Related Questions
• Are CoP members able to access others who share their interests quickly and easily?
• Do members have tools that assist with rapid, one-to-many communication?

Trait No. 8
A successful CoP has several key metrics of success to show business results.

Related Questions
• Does the CoP have a documented measurement system to demonstrate how it is meeting its business value proposition?
• Is there a plan for collecting, reviewing, sharing, and validating metrics?

Trait No. 9
A successful CoP has a recognition plan for participants.

Related Questions
• Do participants understand "what's in it for them?"
• Is the recognition scheme built into the HR process and part of the development or evaluation process?

Trait No. 10
A successful CoP has an agenda of critical topics to cover during the first three to six months of its existence.

Related Questions
• Do community leaders and members have "hot problems" to solve early in the life cycle?
• Are there sufficient face-to-face or voice-to-voice meetings for members within six months of launch?
• Are there enough actions and activities to familiarize the group with working together to solve problems?
Measuring the Impact of Communities
When it comes to evaluating the success of CoPs, efforts tend to revolve around two measurement categories: assessing health and measuring impact.


Depending on the objectives of a particular community or community structure, measures may include the investment and resources required to sustain communities, the level of activity occurring within the CoPs, and or the degree to which knowledge and/or practices are transferred. Some of the standardized measures that APQC uses include:
• frequency of visits to CoP Web sites,
• number of reads per month,
• number of postings per month,
• number of downloads per month, and
• member satisfaction ratings.

Competitive Advantage for All - Strategic Knowledge Management for All Industries and All Sizes

By David Smith

Information is power, and harnessing that power is critical in today’s fast-paced, global business environment. Workers need to use vital content in strategic, efficient ways to create and support best practices that help companies operate effectively.

A wide variety of companies from the FORTUNE 500 to small and mid-sized businesses utilize knowledge management tools to share and protect their knowledge banks in secure, digital repositories. And many are realizing remarkable results. As they enhance best practices and performance, they can also create significant efficiencies that dramatically improve their bottom lines.

How KM Transforms Businesses

Healthcare: Hospital administrative, nursing and doctor teams can access the most up-to-date policy and procedural information 24/7, which ensures compliance and reduces the time staff members take to find the information they need. Pharmaceutical companies can easily meet their compliance requirements by capturing and managing versions of clinical trial documentation.

Education: Universities and school districts must manage a wide variety of information from administrators, faculty, parents, outside professors and students that originates in both paper and digital formats. They are now using content management software to ensure that they follow best practices in teaching curriculum and other educational practices. When school districts and universities transfer their paper-based documents into an electronic content and knowledge management system, they improve accuracy and standardize processes, in addition to saving tremendous amounts of time and money.

Government: State and local organizations have developed best practices in managing huge volumes of documents and procedures electronically. Providing best practices in "online self service" has enabled community members to access information and forms so they can file for permits, licenses and certificates. This has saved the constituents and the government workers substantial amounts of time and money and has also ensured consistency and accuracy.

Retail: Corporate offices can easily and efficiently share policies and plans including new merchandise lines, new store floor plans, hiring and training processes so that everything is consistent in each store location. The corporate offices can share customer feedback so that each store manager has specific objectives and guidelines about how to ensure a positive shopping experience. Providing secure access for store managers to corporate best practices helps maintain quality and customer loyalty.

Manufacturing: Many thousands of technical product documents, specifications, procedures and parts listings can easily be managed and updated, then shared with many thousands of distributed workers around the globe. Important new product information can be immediately accessed and shared by the sales teams in any location.

Entertainment: Film, television and other entertainment companies can easily build best practices into their content-development process so that story lines, scripts and screenplays are submitted, routed, reviewed and stored accurately and consistently. As an example, a feature film studio can potentially route and store 20-plus drafts of a screenplay, along with documents from research, writers, producers, actors, and legal teams. Using content management tools that have "drag and drop" features for emails and attachments has transformed the way studios can organize, use and manage their intellectual assets so that processes are standardized and streamlined.

In addition to business improvements and efficiencies, knowledge management systems have created another welcome benefit by helping companies reduce their carbon footprints—sometimes quite dramatically—by decreasing paper and energy consumption and greenhouse gases. One state government organization saved literally tons of paper and automobile emissions by transferring their paper-based documents and processes into a digital content management system so they no longer handled or mailed paper documents that were a critical part of their day-to-day processes.

It’s exciting that now companies can quantify the benefits of reducing the environmental impact of doing business. This is particularly important for the growing number of government agencies, educational institutions, and businesses that have "green" and "sustainability" initiatives built into their corporate or organizational goals.

The 21st century has presented us with a complex network of information—from emails, blogs and attachments of all types to large databases and huge volumes of varying documents and files. Companies of all sizes, in all industries, must build best practices into a knowledge management system in order to compete and thrive.

Today there is a rich array of software and tools to help people transform their businesses into highly productive environments where they can create, manage, use and re-use critical knowledge assets effectively. Planning, implementing and populating a knowledge management system requires an investment that might seem daunting, however both large and small companies can choose content management tools that are easy to use so they can get started quickly. Within just a few months many organizations realize rapid ROI, so the planning time is well worth the investment. And the best news of all is that there are some very affordable, flexible, yet robust solutions that enable companies to derive strategic value from information, leverage their knowledge banks across the organization, and standardize and automate processes to support their core business functions. Even small company leaders are realizing the need for strategic knowledge management to support efficient growth and adaptability. Knowledge management is finally perceived as a mainstream business requirement for long term success.