Cited references and notes

1. One of the well-known definitions of a community is provided by Sarason. He describes three major elements of a community: first, the community members perceive a similarity to others in the community; second, members recognize a mutual interdependence; and third, members feel that they are part of a larger structure that is both stable and dependable. Since these are elements applying to communities in general, they should apply to the specific type of community that we deal with here, namely the community of practice. S. B. Sarason, The Psychological Sense of Community: Prospects for a Community Psychology, Jossey-Bass Publishers, San Francisco, CA (1974).
2. E. Lesser and L. Prusak, Communities of Practice, Social Capital and Organizational Knowledge, White Paper, IBM Institute for Knowledge Management (August 1999).
3. E. C. Wenger and W. M. Snyder, “Communities of Practice: The Organizational Frontier,” Harvard Business Review 78, No. 1, 139–145 (January 2000).
4. W. M. Snyder, “Communities of Practice: Combining Organizational Learning and Strategy Insights to Create a Bridge to the 21st Century,” Academy of Management Conference, Boston, MA (August 1997).
5. For example, the IBM Institute for Knowledge Management (http://www-1.ibm.com/services/kcm/kcm_ikm.html) and the American Productivity and Quality Center, or APQC (http://www.apqc.org) include “communities of practice” (by one or more names) as a research topic for member organizations. Knowledge-management-related conferences (e.g., KMWorld and Braintrust) routinely include communities of practice as a key agenda topic.
6. By the beginning of 2001, IBM Global Services had over 140000 experts working in 160 countries. IBM Global Services' lines of business included: Business Innovation Services, Integrated Technology Services, Strategic Outsourcing, and Learning Services.
7. For a description of the beginnings of the IBM Global Services knowledge management program, including the start of communities of practice, see: R. Azzarello, D. Haack, F. Schoeps, and B. Smith, “The Design and Implementation of Intellectual Capital Management,” SIM Network XII, No. V, 1–5 (December 1996).
8. Explicit knowledge is knowledge that is “written down,” documented, or recorded in some way. Sometimes explicit knowledge is further considered to be procedures, steps, specifications, etc.
9. T. Stewart, Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations, Currency Doubleday, New York (1997).
10. The small set of common roles includes a community leader, a core team with a router (who first reviews new submissions of intellectual capital and decides who should evaluate them), and category owners (who are subject matter experts in the different subareas of knowledge and who assume responsibility for managing intellectual capital in their subarea).
11. Tacit knowledge is knowledge that is primarily in the heads of people. Michael Polanyi describes tacit knowledge as being “in-dwelling,” meaning that it is constructed from our experience in the world—the sense we make of what we see, touch, feel, and hear. N. M. Dixon, Common Knowledge, How Companies Thrive by Sharing What They Know, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA (2000).
12. A description of ICM AssetWeb is provided in K.-T. Huang, “Capitalizing on Intellectual Assets,” IBM Systems Journal 37, No. 4, 570–583 (1998).
13. E. C. Wenger, “Communities of Practice: Learning as a Social System,” Systems Thinker 9, No. 5, 2–3 (June/July 1998).
14. R. McDermott, “Community Development as a Natural Step: Five Stages of Community Development,” KM Review 3, No. 5 (November/December 2000).
15. Ibid., p. 6
16. The Systems Engineering Institute (SEI) of Carnegie Mellon University has been developing capability maturity models for software engineering for over a decade. Their work is widely known, and the range of material is most readily viewed by accessing their Web site: http://www.sei.cmu.edu/.
17. D. J. Cohen and L. Prusak, In Good Company: How Social Capital Makes Organizations Work, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA (2001).
18. J. Horvath, L. Sasson, J. Sharon, and A. Parker, Intermediaries: A Study of Knowledge Roles in Connected Organizations, White Paper, IBM Institute for Knowledge Management (September 2000).
19. Knowledge Cafe is a Lotus Notes and Domino application that is designed to help people and teams work together more effectively by providing powerful information sharing and collaboration facilities, both for on-line and disconnected use. It is an application used internally in IBM.
20. For an example description of what an issue-based model involves, see A. Dutoit, B. Bruegge, and R. Coyne, “Using an Issue-based Model in a Team-based Software Engineering Course,” Conference on Software Engineering Education and Practice (SEEP96), Dunedin, New Zealand (January 1996), pp. 130–137. Basically, the model provides a structure for starting an issue, then creating proposals to address the issue, providing arguments both for and against the proposals before coming to resolution.
21. S. Haeckel, Adaptive Enterprise: Creating and Leading Sense-and-Respond Organizations, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA (1999).
22. The boundary is “the subsystem at the perimeter of a system that holds together the components that make up the system, protects them from environmental stresses, and excludes or permits entry to various sorts of matter-energy and information.” J. G. Miller, Living Systems, McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York (1978), p. 3. This classic definition of a boundary is developed in the seminal work by Miller that demonstrates the similarities of processes and structures across multiple levels of living systems as well as the emergent properties that develop at each level. This work also provides a wealth of hypotheses and data about the functioning of a boundary subsystem.
23. The project is described in an IBM internally published document: P. Schuett, How to Make Knowledge Management Work in IBM—The Experience Gathered in ESM.
24. John Helmbock, the community leader, describes the global creation, development, and value of the creation of the model in an IBM promotional video tape entitled “Intellectual Capital Management,” Version 1 (June 1997), now out of print.