Week 5 : Knowledge Sharing and Communities of Practice (COP)

 

As we already finished both the lecture and tutorial for chapter 4, we moved on to the Lecture 5 which is about Knowledge Sharing and Communities of Practice (CoP). We have been told by the lecturer that this topic is quite important for us in this syllabus.

So, basically we need to know about several learning outcomes, which are:

·         Describing the key components of a community practice

·         Must define the major roles and tasks in a community of practice

·         And finally, identifying the enablers and obstacles to knowledge sharing

First of all, we must say that once knowledge has been captured and codified, it need to be shared and spread among the organization.

 

Figure 1: Intergrated KM Cycle

In tradition, knowledge has been shared by ‘word of mouth’. Since

the socializing comes naturally to us, there are fewer opportunities

in today’s expended global companies. We must agree that

knowledge sharing these days is faster, more global, more mobile

and of course more connected, thanks to the Internet.

 

Figure 2: Meaning of CoP

                                                                          Figure 3: CoP Cycle

 

 

Besides that, we also learnt about Social Network Analysis (SNA). Basically SNA is about the mapping and measuring of relationship and flows with whomever that in charges for knowledge processing. SNA also identifies the networks so that it can improve the knowledge flow and performance, identify key brokers and hoarders. There are few techniques for SNA, which are:

·         Visualization tools used in conjunction with surveys

·         Cluster analysis – identify highly integrated subgroups

·         Can be automated (e.g. email mapping)

 

 

 

 

Figure 4: SNA nodes

 

A part from that, we also studied about the Community Yellow Pages (1 of the earliest KM applications), Knowledge Sharing Communities, Social Computing, Social Presence, Facilitating Knowledge Sharing, Obstacles to Knowledge Sharing, Undernet and so on.

 

So, in conclusion of this chapter, we can say that

·         Knowledge sharing occurs quite efficiently and effectively in communities of practice where members share a professional interest and goal.

·         Virtual communities are the primary sources of social capital produced that are of value to the organization.

·         Social network analysis can be used to visualize the people and their connections in virtual communities.

·         Some of the key obstacles to knowledge sharing are notions such as knowledge is property, knowledge is power, credibility of the content and the source, organizational culture, and the presence of undernets .