Building Organizational and Management Capital: Collaboration, Communities of

Practice, and Office Environments In addition to the activities we have just described, managers
can help by developing new organizational roles and responsibilities for the acquisition of
knowledge, including the creation of chief knowledge officer executive positions, dedicated
staff positions (knowledge managers), and communities of practice. Communities of practice
(COPs) are informal social networks of professionals and employees within and outside the firm
who have similar work-related activities and interests. The activities of these communities
include self- and group education, conferences, online newsletters, and day-today sharing of
experiences and techniques to solve specific work problems. Many organizations, such as IBM,
the U.S. Federal Highway Administration, and the World Bank have encouraged the
development of thousands of online communities of practice. These communities of practice
depend greatly on software environments that enable collaboration and communication. COPs
can make it easier for people to reuse knowledge by pointing community members to useful
documents, creating document repositories, and filtering information for newcomers. COPs
members act as facilitators, encouraging contributions and discussion. COPs can also reduce the
learning curve for new employees by providing contacts with subject matter experts and access
to a community’s established methods and tools. Finally, COPs can act as a spawning ground for
new ideas, techniques, and decisionmaking behavior.
TYPES OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS There are essentially three major types
of knowledge management systems: enterprise-wide knowledge management systems,
knowledge work systems, and intelligent techniques. Figure 11-2 shows the knowledge
management system applications for each of these major categories. Enterprise-wide
knowledge management systems are general-purpose firmwide efforts to collect, store,
distribute, and apply digital content and knowledge. These systems include capabilities for
searching for information, storing both structured and unstructured data, and locating
employee expertise within the firm. They also include supporting technologies such as portals,
search engines, collaboration tools (e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, blogs, and social
bookmarking), and learning management systems. The development of powerful networked
workstations and software for assisting engineers and scientists in the discovery of new
knowledge has led to the creation of knowledge work systems such as computer-aided design
(CAD), visualization, simulation, and virtual reality systems. Knowledge work systems (KWS) are
specialized systems built for engineers, scientists, and other knowledge workers charged with
discovering and creating new knowledge for a company. We discuss knowledge work
applications in detail in Section 11.3. Knowledge management also includes a diverse group of
intelligent techniques, such as data mining, expert systems, neural networks, fuzzy logic,
genetic algorithms, and intelligent agents. These techniques have different 422 Part Three Key
System Applications for the Digital Age objectives, from a focus on discovering knowledge (data
mining and neural networks), to distilling knowledge in the form of rules for a computer
program (expert systems and fuzzy logic), to discovering optimal solutions for problems
(genetic algorithms). Section 11.4 provides more detail about these intelligent techniques.