Communities of Practice

Intenzz started to encourage all kinds of meetings among employees. The meeting can range from formal company meetings to informal barbeques. Any kind of meeting serves the purpose of getting to know each other, building personal relationships, and trusting each other so that CS can commence. Communal Sharing can occur only among certain people who have a social bond. If an outsider is added, e.g., a new colleague, then it is certain that CS will not be established for a long time. In Intenzz, new colleagues start mostly with EM and slowly, in months or years reach CS.

Based on the lessons learned from the research, in order to adopt CS faster, Intenzz NetWeaver Services set up the Communities of Practice (CoP‘s) listed in Table 19. For a knowledge-intensive, agile consulting firm such as Intenzz, tacit knowledge is crucial, because codified knowledge is usually not enough to make a difference in the market. (See

chapter 2.1.1.3 about the types of knowledge.) For this reason, face-to-face, decentralized knowledge sharing should be supported by management. The CoP concept refers to the process of social learning that occurs when people who have a common interest in some subject or problem collaborate over an extended period to share ideas, find solutions, and build innovations. The main features of the Intenzz CoP‘s are as follows:

 Internally motivated without external driver. This means that consultants take part because they are really interested and they very clearly see personal benefit in devoting time and effort to the given topics. There is no need for a manager to push this initiative. The development of such strong networks of likeminded individuals produces an environment typified by high levels of trust, mutual respect and even shared behavioral norms.

 Developing social capital. This AR factor is also relevant. Participation in CoP‘s allows consultants to demonstrate their expertise and gain reputation and status inside the team.

 Nurturing new knowledge. Quite obviously, a key feature of CoP‘s is their ability to generate new knowledge.

 Stimulating innovation. Since Intenzz employees are elite in their profession, knowledge sharing among them can lead to very innovative ideas. One example is the Exponential Service Oriented Architecture methodology developed by the ESOA Roadmap CoP. This methodology is unique in the market and it constitutes the main vision of Intenzz.

 Sharing existing tacit knowledge. Sharing codified knowledge can be facilitated in various ways, including by portal. Tacit knowledge is more difficult to share, but the CoP‘s attempt to reach this goal as well.

 Part of organizational development. As CoP‘s represent regular meetings among colleagues, most social life within Intenzz is related to CoP‘s. The way CoP‘s get started, develop, and disband reflects major dynamics in the organization. CoP‘s support team building by creation of understanding, trust, team spirit, and team cohesion.

Table 19: CoP‘s (Source: own data)

CoP Short Description

eSOA Roadmap Create methodology/service to present/explain Enterprise Service Oriented Architecture, cover SOA governance BPM/ccBPM Learn existing Business Process Management

tools/technologies, follow the development in this area (e.g., the Galaxy project or cross-component BPM)

Enterprise Services Service provisioning, consumption, Enterprise Service bundles, web service security, business objects, etc.

Visual Composer SAP Visual Composer is a tool that is designed to enable business analysts to easily create applications that can be used in the SAP NetWeaver Enterprise Portal.

Federated Portal Network A federated portal network allows organizations with distributed portal installations, both SAP and non-SAP, to provide a single portal access point per user to portal

information, services, and applications distributed on portals throughout the entire organizational network.

In order to make CoP‘s successful, it is necessary to let them organize themselves voluntarily. Each year all three teams (Process Integration (XI), Enterprise Portal (EP), and Business Intelligence (BI)) inside Intenzz hold an important meeting where they decide on the so-called focus areas. The methodology for deciding on these focus areas is as follows:

1. List all the IT practices and scenarios defined by SAP

2. Identify the IT practices and scenarios and variants relevant for the team 3. Rate the expected market demand for each variant

4. Rate the level of existing knowledge in each variant within the team 5. Rate the level of interest (ambitions) for each variant within the team 6. Make a decision for each variant. Possible options:

● F (focus area)

● S (service offering)

● H (knowledge missing, to be hired)

● I (ignore, i.e., the given variant is not expected to play an important role in coming year)

This means that the teams make a conscious forecast each year about various trends in the SAP market and allocate resources accordingly. Each team member goes through this process and the results are aggregated to reach a final decision. If there is enough knowledge available internally, a service offering is written and the sales team of Intenzz

strives to win projects in this area. If the knowledge is completely missing, it makes sense to hire employees with that knowledge. It would otherwise require much effort to internally develop this knowledge. If the topic is not rated highly by the team members, then it can be ignored for the coming year. Otherwise a topic is worth the effort and will become a focus area. This logic is demonstrated in Figure 16:

Figure 16: Knowledge development at Intenzz (Source: own figure)

Participants were assigned to the CoP‘s at two levels: fixed members, who promise to actively participate and contributing members, who sometimes contribute without any fixed commitment. The list of the CoP‘s and their membership list have been published in the Intenzz portal. CoP membership can cross team boundaries. This approach helps to minimize null relations between employees of NetWeaver Services and Business Intelligence Services. It also helps bypass hierarchies within Intenzz (AR model) and enable knowledge sharing based on CS. Figure 17 shows how certain CoP‘s can be specific to a business unit, can cross business units, or be relevant for all of Intenzz.

Figure 17: CoP‘s and business units (Source: own figure)

The fact that CoP‘s go beyond team boundaries has multiple benefits for the organization since teams (such as Business Intelligence, Process Integration and Portal teams) have serious limitations (McDermott 1999):

 Teams can become silos. Good teams have some special bond based on values, focus, physical proximity, etc. This can lead to a ―we against them‖ thinking when dealing with other teams. The result can be that knowledge sharing among teams is limited and none of the teams are really interested in it. A typical symptom is that people reinvent ideas which have already been developed by other teams; thus the same work is wastefully repeated in the organization.

 Teams can get isolated. If there is no structural connection between teams, they can develop into a completely separate organizational unit, losing on the synergy effect.

 Isolation can lead to team myopia. Once a team reaches a high level of isolation, the team members can get so closed-minded that they are unwilling to listen to ideas coming from outside the team. (―not invented here‖ syndrome) This is especially counterproductive given that ideas from outside can be very efficient in fertilizing the given team by introducing new perspectives.

 Teams can neglect longer-term knowledge developments. Teams are usually arranged around existing business activities. In order to develop new competencies,

knowledge for the future, sometimes it is necessary to distance from the existing team structure.

McDermott (1999) recommends ―double-knit‖ organizational structure to avoid the above pitfalls. Double-knit structure is based on teams for existing business activity and CoP‘s for innovation and knowledge development. Figure 17 shows the realization of this approach inside Intenzz. The double-knit organizational form is not the same as a matrix.

While the double-knit organization has a formal, fixed and centrally organized dimension (teams) and an informal, flexible and self-organizing one (CoP‘s), the matrix structure consists of two formal dimensions (e.g., functional and project).

An important aspect to keep in mind when creating a structure in which people participate in several CoP‘s is that participants may get very stressed when they feel there is a conflict between two relationships of the same type. Imagine two communities requiring effort; in case of conflict due to time limitations, stress can occur. If no stress at all is present, we may question if the relationship is CS at all.

Intenzz introduced the following guidelines regarding CoP‘s:

 Agree on topics and chose members voluntarily! (periodically)

 Let the members agree on their preferred way of communication (personal meetings/chat/email/phone calls)

 Create a folder in the Intenzz portal

 Use resources creatively (competition, SAP, conferences, etc.)

 Create a knowledge map of the topics

 Plan how to obtain knowledge e.g., align training sessions

 Establish the goal(s) and set milestones in a written form

 Present deliverables at milestones to the CoP and Intenzz (preferably a scenario in the demo system)

 Provide input for recruiting

 Set up a weekly routine to read SAP materials

 Share resources and ideas

 Let the customers know about the CoP‘s

The role of the partners was defined as follows:

 Agree on topics and assign members voluntarily! (periodically)

 Guide with knowledge map creation

 Review goals and plans

 Support and motivate

 Feed back on deliverables

 Connect CoP‘s together

 Keep the CoP‘s aligned with Intenzz directions

In the first meeting in the life of a CoP, the members are expected to together write a document covering the following points:

 List of members

 Definition of the CoP: what knowledge areas are included and which ones are excluded

 Goal of the CoP: what will the CoP achieve

 Approach: how the goal will be achieved

 Ways of working: how the CoP members will work together (meetings in the office, off-site readings, etc.)

 Document management: how the Intenzz portal will be used

Nahapiet & Ghoshal (1998) showed that the CoP environment is ideal for knowledge sharing. There has been no measurement inside Intenzz about the level of knowledge or the consequent increase in the level of knowledge, but management and employees think that their success in the market is partially due to the advanced knowledge sharing in CoP‘s.

The demand in the market for SAP consultants is extremely high, which means that the opportunity cost of each hour spent on knowledge sharing is very high. Despite this economic factor (MP), CoP‘s are very active, so CS dominates over MP.