Synopsis "Knowledge Within Groups: Formation of Communities and Networks"
Today's modern enterprises are entities that strive to create, share, and consume knowledgeeffectively with the least amount of overhead possible. The endeavor is to enable businessperformance using all the resources that are available to it. Businesses organize themselves intodifferent groups, each performing specific tasks or projects, and each member defined by theroles and responsibilities of its management. Individuals and groups clearly make use ofknowledge, both explicit and tacit, in what they do.Communities of practice, or CoPs, are custodians of knowledge that an enterprise aspires to, but which they do not directly create. Individuals within the communities create the knowledge;it is the job of communities to integrate and institutionalize it. Even though organizations thinkof knowledge in organization, groups, and CoPs, it is necessary to focus in this study onindividuals in the context of knowledge creation. Enterprises roll out knowledge managementinitiatives for these purposes, but have met with limited success because individuals areincentivized to use the knowledge to achieve business goals; there is no (or very little) incentiveto share or seek knowledge.Most of the knowledge management systems have an emphasis on the codification ofknowledge. Codified knowledge is important, but real productivity enhancers in groups andorganizations are sources of tacit knowledge that exist within the groups and individuals withinthe group.In this study, the knowledge within CoPs, groups, and individuals, is examined. Primarily, aknowledge ontology is defined that is appropriate in the context of CoPs, groups, andindividuals while keeping in mind creation, codification, and usage of knowledge byindividuals within the context of CoPs and groups.It is established through quantitative analysis that organizations and their members miss theknowledge which goes along with employees who leave an organization. Enterprises cannotcodify all the knowledge that they desire. One of the ways to access the tacit knowledge of anindividual is socialization. A mechanism is defined to build knowledge networks based on thecommunication patterns across individuals as part of their interaction in a CoP. Theseknowledge networks are then examined using social network analysis reveals the fact that eachgroup has leaders, matchmakers who hold on to their position for long periods based on theircontribution. These results are valid across multiple domains.Enterprises may have their taxonomies it makes the content unsuitable for natural languageprocessing. Even synonyms for words may be unsuitable. We define the concept of knowledgeadjacency to find more appropriate alternative phrases for a candidate query that user may wantto search. The information communication system is sometimes used by the organizationmembers to advance their aims giving rise the phenomenon of cliques. We look at communitiesof practice for the existence of the similar phenomenon. Additionally, a methodology isproposed to identify these cliques and evaluate their characteristics.We also look at what is holding these communities of practice alive. We define a mechanismto identify these individuals whose attrition may be most damaging to the community.Finally, we propose a system architecture that can be the foundation for next generation ofknowledge management systems which is more helpful in identifying the knowledge andsource of knowledge within a community of practice
