Posts Tagged "value-creation"

We have just spent two days with the social learning team at Deutsche Bank. A dynamic project Banks have had a bad rap of late, so it was a really pleasant surprise to see the work they are doing. It did not seem an obvious home for an ambitious social learning project, but it is what we found there. In less than a year the project has launched about two-dozen communities of practice. They have established a process for starting new communities and a framework for guiding their evolution. They are reaching the stage of forming a community for community leaders. Focus on people Again we were reminded of the importance of starting a social learning initiative by focusing on the social first and the technology second. Their Jive platform has opened the door, but they...

Something got us excited in a strategic meeting with Executive Networks the other day in San Francisco. Executive Networks is a company that builds communities of practice for executives mainly in HR. The Community Directors were very appreciative of our Assessment Framework. They were particularly taken by the value-creation matrix (Figure 7.1, page 39). They liked the idea of integrating quantitative indicators and narratives of value creation and the fact that the usefulness of the framework is both retrospective (what learning a communities has enabled) and prospective (what learning a community may enable). In other words, the framework can be used to account for the value of an existing community and also to imagine the development of a community through...

Should communities of practice attempt to assess or measure the value they create? The issue of measurement and assessment is a controversial one when it comes to communities. Some see measurements as community killers and some see them as the only way communities can survive in organizations. The reality of most communities is more nuanced. While it is true that red tape can harm a community, some awareness of the value created can also inspire members and legitimize their participation and personal investment. And while demonstrating value to an organization is important to ensure support and sponsorship, trying to measure everything is not always the best way to make the value of a community understandable. This calls for a very pragmatic attitude. Communities...

Why should organizations pay attention to communities of practice and networks? Communities of practice are the perfect vehicle for involving practitioners directly in the management of the knowledge they need individually and collectively to do their work. As a result they engage in the development of strategic capabilities critical for achieving the goals of the organization(s) they belong to. For instance, consulting firms cultivate communities of practice so that when clients interact with a consultant they actually have access to the knowledge and intelligence of the whole firm, not just one person. Schools cultivate communities of practice so that teachers move from being lonely practitioners to offering their students the pedagogical creativity of the whole...

As communities and networks go more mainstream there is an increasing demand from organizations to have ways of monitoring their value. How can we make the connection between the activities of a community and the improved performance of the organization? In our value assessment framework, published by the Open University of the Netherlands, we identify five levels of value creation of a community or network: Cycle 1. Immediate value: the activities and interactions between members have value in and of themselves Cycle 2. Potential value: the activities and interactions of cycle 1 may not be realized immediately, but rather be saved up as knowledge capital whose value is in its potential to be realized later. Cycle 3. Applied value: knowledge capital...