COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE

COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE

I believe that many organisations achieved their goals by depending on the creation of an innovative knowledge system based on COP. From communities of practice organisations can acquire more knowledge through connecting people, overcoming difficulties and by creating business opportunities.

COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE-WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

Wenger,E and W.M. Snyder says ‘’Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic , and who depend their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis’’.

For example, Artists congregate in cafes and studios to debate the merits of a new style or technique. Gang members learn to survive on the street and deal with an unfriendly world. Engineers who design a certain kind of electronic circuits find it useful to compare designs regularly and to discuss the logics. (Wenger,E and W.M. Snyder, 2000)
It is not necessary to these people, work together but they meet because they find value in their interaction. They help each other solve problems. Over time, they develop a unique perspective on their topic as well as a body of common knowledge, practices and approach.

WHY COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE:

Knowledge plays a key role in contributing success to the organisations. Cultivating communities of practice in strategic areas is the best way to manage knowledge. Communities of practice can connect people not only from multinational organisations but also from independent business units. In this process, they join the whole system together around core knowledge requirements. Success in global markets depends on communities sharing knowledge across the globe. (W.M. Snyder and R. Dermott, 2002)

In globalised world, companies are not only competing for market share but also for talent.Talent in the sense, people with experience and innovative thinking. Finding and keeping the right people can make a big difference in a company’s ability to become a market leader and to gain access to venture capital. In some industries, recruiting, developing and retaining talent is a greater challenge than competing in commercial markets. (E .Wenger, 2002)

MY UNDERSTANDING:

Communities of practice are not new to us. In early human life also we can find cop’s. People came to know how to make tools to kill their prey through communities of practice. Communities of practice are everywhere. Even in our lives we have faced many of them- in families, schools, work etc.., .

The purpose of communities of practice is to maximise the knowledge within an organisation by connecting people from different organisations. At first, I had a doubt, do knowledge management and community of practice have same definitions? Yes, but with a slight variation. Knowledge management involves in capturing, sharing and distributing knowledge among the employees of an individual organisation. Where as in communities of practice, the knowledge sharing does not belong to any single organisation. Here, knowledge is shared and maximised from different people belonging to different organisations.

With my personal experience I got a clear idea about communities of practice. In my school days, my teacher gave us a task to write a document about how to increase literacy rate in India. We people formed as groups to do the task. We have four sections of a class. Each section was given the same task to do. My group in my section began to meet other groups in other sections. My group listed many ways to increase the literacy rate by discussing with different students about their views. We people used to meet at the corridors in the school itself. Where ever there is a necessity to correct we used to rectify our mistakes in our meetings. Actually this is not an organised process but it happened like that. Finally, my group stood in first place in doing the task. Now I came to know about the importance of community of practice.

CONCLUSION:

In some communities of practices people used to hide their information. In such cases it doesn’t give a meaning to communities of practice. For example, in my Msc , in of my modules we create blogs to form communities of practice to improve our knowledge on the subject we have, but some of us haven’t published their articles.

REFERENCES:

1. Wenger, E and W.M.Snyder.’’Communities of practice: The organisational frontier.’’ Harvard Business Review,(2000)

2. Cultivating Communities Of Practice-Wenger,E .., Dermott, R and Snyder ,W.M,(2002),Harvard business school press, Boston