Knowledge management as a doughnut: Shaping your knowledge strategy through communities of practice.

Etienne Wenger

The author
Debate about the utility of knowledge management continues today. As long as we adopt a good model for managing knowledge, in this case, a doughnut, its practice can give a company a decided advantage.

Practitioners
are people in position, who use knowledge to manage their activities. need the proper organizational context

 knowledge of any field is too complex to any individual to cover and therefore they need to interact with colleagues to benefit from stimulation and thus creates a community of practice;

Communities of practice
groups of people who share a passion for something that they know how to do, and who interact regularly in order to learn how to do it better. a cornerstone in knowledge management
Needs to grown by participating in such dialogues with executives in the organization, other communities of practice, and experts outside the organization.

Three elements to connect to the communities

Domain- the area of knowledge that brings the community together, gives it its identity, and defines the key issues that members need to address. Community-the group of people for whom the domain is relevant, the quality of the relationships among members, and the definition of the boundary between the inside and the outside. Practice:-the body of knowledge, methods, tools, stories, cases, documents, which members share and develop together.

Doughnut model

Strategy Performance
Strategy to performance: Practice: Engage practitioners in the development of their practice. Community: Cultivate the communities according to each domain. Domain: Translate the strategy of the organization into a set of domains of knowledge.

Performance to strategy: Domain: Think about knowledge strategically. Community: Broaden the scope of learning beyond its source. Practice: Translate the learning inherent in activities into refined practices.

Three structures to sustain the doughnut

Sponsorship structure high-level executive sponsorship as well as the sponsorship of line managers who control the time usage of employees to make sure that the community has the resources it needs to function and that its ideas and proposals find their way into the organization.

Three structures to sustain the doughnut

Recognition structure the advantage of a community is that it allows practitioners to build a reputation beyond the team. Support structure communities need some organizational support to function optimally.

Insights
The key phrase in this article is communities of practice. This aims to shape knowledge strategy for organizations. The Doughnut model illustrates the cycle of knowledge management. It contains strategy to performance and performance to strategy information. This is an advantage because we are able to crosscheck and learn new knowledge in the most simple and easy way to understand. This makes it easy for later learning, sharing, applying and storing.

Opinion
The one point I am in disagreeable terms are the examples illustrated. The examples are all big companies with strong resources to apply, sponsor and support for the implementation of Doughnut model. For the case of small companies with weak resources, it is still a question on how are they are able to do the same things where they are lacking in good human resources, technology and capital.