Communities of Practice: The Heart of KM
Few things can derail a community more quickly than a poorly defined scope. The organization’s KM manager told us, “We had communities that started with this problem, and 6 months later, they were really struggling.” To avoid this outcome, the organization requires each new community to create a comprehensive outline that details the community’s scope, objectives, and membership. The outline is validated by KM leaders as well as by the organization’s scientific director to ensure that each community adds value to the business. Once communities are validated, they receive an operational budget to organize meetings and fund community management activities.
While every community gets some initial funding, they aren’t guaranteed funds in the future. Instead, they have to continually demonstrate that they are achieving their purpose. The organization uses a maturity scale to measure each community on factors such as knowledge reuse, sponsor involvement, and the extent to which the community cuts across business silos. These measures help ensure that communities continue to deliver for the business.
Graphic: The top KM priorities in 2025
Active Management Helps Communities Thrive
In a roundtable discussion with KM professionals from a wide range of organizations, we discussed the benefits and challenges of communities. Regardless of the reasons for starting their communities, participants said the following practices had been helpful for managing and sustaining them:
♦ Provide governance. Communities are more effective when they have defined roles and responsibilities. We recommend identifying community leaders and facilitators who are strong, visible, and knowledgeable advocates about the topic at hand and who have influence over others.
♦ Carry out regular health checks so communities don’t sputter out. For example, one participant said her organization’s communities regularly rate themselves on critical success factors such as leadership and engagement and continually review the business case for each community.
♦ Monitor community KPIs such as site visits, discussion activity, number of posts, and the number of best practices shared.
♦ Use enabling tools and technology such as team collaboration or digital workplace apps and AI. While AI is a newer technology for CoPs, participants said it can help to surface content, answer general questions, and create meeting summaries.
While technology is a big enabler for communities, it also presents challenges. For example, some participants mentioned struggling with technology adoption and differing levels of comfort with technology. Challenges such as these speak to the importance of change management for engaging users and explaining the benefits of using tools in specific ways. More broadly, communities need active management to stay healthy and focused on specific goals.
Investments in Community Leadership Pay Off
Leadership is one of the most important foundations of a successful community. We’ve found that more than two-thirds of surveyed organizations have formal roles for their community leaders. Nearly all respondents (91%) also said that their leaders have at least some percentage of their time devoted to their community leader role.
A KM program manager from a global aerospace company told us that investments in community leadership have been a critical success factor for the organization’s ability to maintain a vibrant ecosystem of 90 communities serving approximately 3,000 employees—even across numerous mergers, acquisitions, and leadership changes.