Preface for the Third Edition - Read

486 C. State of Practice
with most organizations not having supported any communities systematically and
those who have communities just use a very small number of such collectives. The
“real” share of organizations exploiting more or less systematically the concept of
theme-oriented informal collectives of people might be higher than the 28.2%
found here.
TABLE C-26. Number of communities participating in KM
number of communities frequency percent
< 2 3 27.27
2 - 4 4 36.36
5 - 9 2 18.18
10 - 24 1 9.09
25 - 49 0 0.00
50 - 99 0 0.00
100 - 499 1 9.09
500 0 0.00
total 11 100.00
One interviewee responsible for KM in a large industry organization responded
that his organization does not call their networks communities, but “knowledge
networks”. This is due to the fact that members of these networks are suggested by
a central KM unit that also supports the networks. Consequently, these networks
lack the self-organizing character of communities 35 . Also, the networks observed
in the interviews were of varying degrees of formality from unrecognized or bootlegged
communities unknown to the next level of hierarchy to strategic or even
transformative collectives openly supported by the organization by allocated time
and budgets (e.g., in the case of a post-merger integration project).
In the 1998 KPMG study, 63% of the organizations with a KM initiative said
they had already established some form of informal KM network (KPMG 1998,
13). It might be that in some of the organizations these networks could be qualified
as communities or as a network of employees interested in KM or both. The observation
that organizations with KM initiatives pay a lot of attention to informal networks
of knowledge sharing is supported by the finding that while 63% of the
organizations established informal KM networks, only 40% had formal KM networks
(KPMG 1998, 13).
In the following, the number of participating employees or employees with
access to certain KM-related ICT systems will be compared to the total number of
35. See section 6.1.3.3 - “Communities” on page 180.