DeakinPrime

Despite everything that the modern KM practitioner knows about communities,
collaboration and technology, communities of practice (CoPs) often fail and
collaboration often breaks down. In order to establish an effective CoP, it’s necessary first to think about the nature and structure of a community and recognize that it’s an entirely different entity from a work group or a project team. As such, it must be treated differently, too. In this article, author Keith De La Rue examines the pitfalls associated with CoPs and why helping them to grow and flourish requires a better understanding of three words: “community”, “practice” and “technology”.

Many large organizations have subject matter experts with a deep knowledge and understanding of business-critical information. This knowledge needs to be conveyed to a target audience in another area of the organization, mostly comprised of staff with a lower level of technical expertise. In traditional organizational structures, content management, intranet, communications and training are often located in separate silos. Yet all of these areas provide tools that assist in knowledge transfer – the desired end result is an informed audience. This splitting of functions can lead to inefficiency, duplication of effort, confused messages and errors. Other critical factors impacting effective knowledge transfer are maintenance of the currency and accuracy of content, as well as the problem of knowledge hoarding.

In this article, a strategy for building a complete knowledge transfer toolkit will be described. This toolkit includes a range of individual elements, comprising content management, communications, learning and multimedia elements, coordinated as a managed program. Approaches to maintaining the currency and accuracy of content, dealing with knowledge hoarding and the relevance of social media principles will also be addressed.

Recent research has shown that conversation is important for improving innovation. It has also been found that conversation improves group and individual performance and knowledge sharing. This article will address some of the principles of innovation and how conversational techniques can be harnessed to improve business outcomes. Innovation can mean many things, from minor tweaking of a business process to a totally new invention or discovery. Innovation is also a very hot topic. A search for ‘innovation’ on Google yields over 400 million results. Yet there are also many different ideas on how to innovate.

One of the most common images of discovery and invention is the lone genius in the laboratory, conceiving grand plans for the new and spectacular. Another is the dramatic ‘Eureka!’ moment of inspiration – Newton under the apple tree, or Archimedes in the bath. Yet as widespread as these notions are, most invention and innovation does not happen this way.