Book Synopsis

With the emergence of the knowledge era, an enterprise's intangible assets are key to its ability to create a competitive advantage and to grow at an accelerated pace. As a result, organizations are implementing initiatives that create value through leveraging knowledge. One approach is to encourage the development of communities of practice within the organization as a vehicle for increasing intellectual capital through knowledge creation and sharing. By acknowledging the value of communities (e.g., recognition of membership contribution, support for time commitment) and providing communities with an infrastructure (e.g., communication platform, facilitation, information resources), organizations can increase the speed at which communities innovate, extend the reach of the community's knowledge sharing, and provide an opportunity to make the community's knowledge persistent.

As a key component of Clarica Life Insurance Company's Knowledge Capital Initiative, communities of practice have been encouraged to form and flourish enterprise-wide. Based on a recent project to establish a virtual community of practice for Clarica's independent agents, this book combines theory and practice to outline a process model that describes the development cycle from conceptual, procedural, descriptive, and reflective perspectives.
With knowledge management and educational design as guiding principles, the authors "tell the story" of how, as part of a knowledge strategy, an organization can approach the creation and support of communities of practice. A practitioner's guide that outlines the theory (why are we doing this?) but focuses on the practice (how can we do it?), this book provides a conceptual framework, a process model, a narrative of the approach, illustrations and examples of support activities, and a discussion of lessons learned.