(Article 3) Organization and community of practice

.............................Human is created in the earth to live a social life. When a human is born, he or she becomes the part of the family. And family is considered as the first school of a person. From then itself social life of the person starts. In a way, we can say that family as an organization. May be many will argue on this point, but I sticks to my point.

..........................Talking about the organization, in the growing time itself he/she becomes the part of different communities. In the school, college and also in the working place there is a common motto, at the same time the person has got their own interest. E.Wenger(March, 2001) defines community of practice as a group of people working towards some interest, by learning from interaction and from experiences. ”Domain”,” community” and ”practice” are the main characteristics of community of practice.

....................Now every organization is implementing communities of practice in all sense. Because its not possible to stand as an organization itself, but as “learning organization”, which concentrates on learning from the competition itself (R Schultheis, M Sumner, 1997). Now the most successful organizations are learning organizations. The basic disciplines of learning organization are personal mastery, mental models, building shared vision, team learning, systems thinking (R Schultheis, M Sumner, 1997). Learning organizations encourages the knowledge and its use within the organization. As part of the strategy, Communities of Practice are practical applications (Brad Hinton, 2003)

...................The key factor in the success of an organization will be knowledge. So in a learning organization it’s very important to share the knowledge within them. And for knowledge sharing the most important solution must be the use of IT. Nowadays no organization can stand in the industry without the help of information technology. So for the sharing of knowledge; networks can be used (A Ardichvili, M Maurer, W Li, T Wentling ,R Stuedemann ,2006). This may be of different type online communities, intranets, social networks etc. All these will support the organization to work better and aim for more. Here the factors noted by E.Wenger(March, 2001); domain, community and practice exist. One of the main advantages of the Cop is their ability to distribute tacit knowledge, of an expert to a large group (A Ardichvili, M Maurer, W Li, T Wentling and R Stuedemann, 2006). That is important as an organization.It shows that community of practice exists in almost every successful organization.

...................To be a part of the network is essential in Community of practice. Communities of Practice exist wherever there is a will to share information and experiences in a community .Within the network they are interacting personally, which results in a community feeling and trust within a group (Brad Hinton, 2003).Communities of Practice can be virtual ,which means that members may not work in specific location. Members do not even have to be part of the one firm and can be established by individuals, like farmers, outside any institutional framework.

.................Talking about the online communities, such as facebook, orkut, hi5 etc are becoming part of the lifestyle itself. Any person, who is capable of operating the computer, should be in any kind of online social community. These kinds of networks bind the people in a virtual world. Here the primary motto is “interest” of the people to socialize. So we can say that it’s a community of interest. The members are not official in nature but in formal way.Sometimes the common goal is missing in that kind of communities and they were only concentrating on the individual goals.

.................In an organization the most important part is team work, for that we are using different techniques. Making special teams, allocation of expertise, continuous flow of information etc are very few of them. Community of practice exists in every successful organization, which leads towards the growth of the organization and also to the development of the person within the organization.



Reference:

• Brad Hinton June 20-21, 2003. Knowledge Management and Communities of Practice: an experience from Rabobank Australia and New Zealand ,IAMA World Food and Agribusiness Symposium

• Alexandre Ardichvili, Martin Maurer, Wei Li, Tim Wentling and Reed Stuedemann,2006,Cultural influences on knowledge sharing through online communities of practice,JOURNAL OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT,vol 10,no 1, pp 94-107.

• Robert Schultheis, Mary Sumner, 1997, Management information systems, Forth edition,New Delhi:Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Company Limited.

• Etienne Wenger,March 2001,Supporting community of practice:a survey of community-oriented technologies,Draft,version 1.3
  

• http://www.ewenger.com/theory/index.html