How to Take Communities of Practice to the Next Level (Video)

Video produced by Steve Nathans-Kelly

Organizations need to become better at some of the capture processes within communities.

At KMWorld 2019, Lynda Braksiek, Collins Aerospace director, knowledge & change strategies, explained how to model better communities of practice.

At Collins Aerospace, she said, "because the company is so big now, we need to bring people together in small pockets, so that we can actually get work done. Because if we try to do something for the whole corporation it's just not gonna work, it's 70,000 people, There's too many people. But if we can bring a group of 200 people who all work in the same domain or discipline area they can do a lot for the company and they can learn from each other."

Braksiek explained that the company has "established this model where we've taken all the pieces, basically of KM, and said, we want a community to be responsible for these things. Utilizing the same tools, utilizing the same templates that we can all use and go be that success for that community of that discipline, that domain area—that area of expertise within the company. And our community leaders gather on a regular basis and will talk about best practices and things like that as well. But we're trying to take communities to the next level. And with our new company that purchased us, they didn't have communities, so they don't know any different."

She explained, "We're rolling something out for the first time and we're going to say, this is how we want to do communities within our organization and this is how we're going to model this to you. So it's a great time to evolve the program we had into something better and to introduce something new to an organization who didn't have it in the first place. And they're bringing all sorts of great ideas and we're going to roll this out within our operations division as well as our KM community."

Currently, she said, Collins Aerospace has about 90 communities of practice and they may increase or decrease in number, depending on what the need is.

To access the full session, go to A301. Re-Evaluating & Evolving Your KM Program.

Videos of KMWorld 2019 awards presentations, keynotes, and many sessions can be found here.

Many speakers at KMWorld 2019 have also made their presentations available at www.kmworld.com/Conference/2019/Presentations.aspx.

SAVE THE DATE FOR KMWORLD 2020: NOVEMBER 16-19, 2020!