Chapter VIII: Lessons Learned

In this final chapter we summarise briefly our journey from KM to our CoP and draw out lessons that can be learned from the issues that have arisen and the insights we have gained. We also consider what practical implications they might have.

OUR JOURNEY SO FAR

In this book we have explored the inner workings of a distributed international Community of Practice (CoP). In order to reach that point we first explored the field of Knowledge Management (KM) to set the context for the study. In doing so, we noted that a large part of KM focuses on the capturecodify-store approach and did not consider less structured knowledge that does not lend itself so well to this cycle. We did, however, note that less structured knowledge is receiving increasingly more attention, but the predominant approach to its "management" appears to be to try to convert it to a form where it can be captured.

Feeling that perhaps a different approach was required, we used the terms "soft" and "hard" knowledge and explored the notion of soft knowledge in some detail, as the management of hard knowledge is already well established. This led to the conclusions that dealing with soft knowledge in isolation is problematic and that knowledge should be viewed as a duality, with all knowledge being both soft and hard, with the balance varying. Harder aspects of knowledge would be easy to capture and codify while the softer aspects would be difficult (or impossible) to capture.

Observing that CoPs are groups where the softer aspects of knowledge are created, nurtured, and sustained, we refined our definition of a CoP, noting that shared artefacts might be an avenue worthy of exploration and embarked on our study to explore how a CoP functions in a distributed international environment. In doing so, a number of issues came to the surface, and we gained some valuable insights. But what can we learn from them?