Most people have joined one or more social networks nowadays. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter: many people have found a way to use them to their advantage. They know how to create value out of it by participating, or even just by observation. People feel comfortable by doing that. Participating and joining discussions with their peers, known or unknown, can lead to unexpected leads, build knowledge that you were or weren’t looking for, and can keep you updated in many ways.

These social networks are becoming customary tools in organizations as well. Like other niche markets, it becomes easier to extract value for people, or employees, by participating in these relatively small networks. However, to extract relevant value for employees, you can not copy the features of a social network and go from there. It strongly depends on the goals, the number of participants, the prevalent culture, the expertise of the participants, to name just a few dependencies.

Networks for employees that share the same expertise, are not social networks. We prefer to use the term ‘Communities of Practice’ (CoP), after the principles of Etienne Wenger. Wenger is known for his work on Communities of Practice. He has written some important books about the subject. He tries to understand the connection between knowledge, community, learning, and identity. You can call a CoP a practical community as well, however that would be a misuse of the term CoP. A CoP is more than a community for practitioners, it focuses more on knowledge and learning. Goals of a Community of Practice often refer to the exchange of knowledge, enabling you to doing your job better, or more efficient.

Why is that? What phenomena do you undertake that are just too time consuming? Do you recognize some of the following?

• not knowing the goals of your colleagues
• not taking the time to share success stories
• departments that do not know what other departments are doing
• the usage of wrong processes or procedures
• project delays by too many talking and decision making
• tasks that are being done redundantly
• updates that are being e-mailed to everybody
• searching information that takes too much time
• searching the right people that takes too much time

One of our objectives for a Community of Practice is to make the above time consuming phenomena more efficient. The above list is just a small sample of the phenomena. Other goals can be identifying critical moments, collaboration, sharing of knowledge, and many more. It depends on the variables I noted before.

Social networks for organizations, or Communities of Practice if you like, are becoming more important. Many companies understand the opportunities for such a community. Employees are better equipped to make use of tools that are becoming quite familiar due to the reach of the current social networks. It is important to make the distinction between social networks and Communities of Practice and understand the true potential of a CoP. However knowledge about implementing a CoP within an organization is still in its early stages. That’s one of the challenges we’re facing these days.