Column Two » communities of practice

Interview with Faith Wainwright of Arup

James Robertson — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 19:17:23 +0000

When I was in London late last year, I was pleased to have an opportunity to record a video interview with Faith Wainwright of Arup. Gold winners of the 2010 Intranet Innovation Awards, their skills networks are powerful and global communities of practice. Of great interest to intranet teams and knowledge managers alike.

In this 8 minute video, we cover:

Challenges for a global consultancy?
What are skills networks?
Evolution of the networks?
Business benefits?
Lessons learnt?
Tips for others?

Alstom: communities of practice

James Robertson — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 01:54:45 +0000

When I was recently in Europe, one of my stops was Paris, for an intranet breakfast event organised by Jane McConnell. This brought together some of France’s biggest companies to talk about intranets, and it was a great morning.

One of the presentations was by Alstom, talking about their efforts to establish collaboration within the organisation. Under the banner of Alstom University, they’ve produced some great educational material to support the initiative. Generously, they’ve also shared some of this online.

This includes resources on YouTube, such as:

As well as a good presentation on SlideShare:

Great stuff!

How to empower authors

James Robertson — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 04:14:19 +0000

In most organisations authors are vital to the effectiveness of the intranet. Despite this, authors are often given the task of updating content with little or no thought to their skills, suitability or desire.

Intranet teams generally have little influence over who becomes an author. As intranets mature and become better understood as a business tool, it is to be hoped that this will change.

This article focuses on what intranet teams can do to empower authors by providing effective and targeted tools and resources. In the context of this article the term authors broadly includes staff who, write and publish content, publish content written by others, write content only.

Any tools or resources that the intranet team develops for authors need to take into account the:

turnover of authors, that is the average length of time staff are responsible for authoring
geographical location of authors, and whether they are all in one main office or spread around the country or the world
cultural drivers for the organisation and the specific factors that influence management, change and peer groups in the workplace
capacity of the intranet team to deliver support, tools and resources

In many cases the intranet team has an untapped resource in the number of authors in an organisation. Providing the right tools and resources can help harness this power.

[December KM Column by Catherine Grenfell, read the full article]

CoPs 101

James Robertson — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 20:22:53 +0000

Kim Sbarcea has pointed to some very useful introductory resources on communities of practice. To quote:

Once again, I find myself in need of explaining CoPs (communities of practice) to people I’m working with. I’ve been working with CoPs since 2002 in the same organisation. There’s been the usual ups and downs – a couple of CoPs bit the dust (really because they’d reached the limits of their purpose); senior management have tried to get their claws into the CoPs or grilled me over ROI on the CoPs; and the CoPs have survived a recent restructure.