There are more than 400,000 employees all throughout the world working for Siemens today, providing a unique opportunity within the Siemens Corporation for extensive knowledge sharing. Because of this extensive network, initiating and supporting Knowledge Communities are an ideal way to promote the creation and sharing of knowledge across groups and regions within Siemens. The Siemens Knowledge Communities Support is a corporate project to initiate and support Knowledge Communities within Siemens. A Knowledge Community is a “a group of people who, based on a common interest in a specific subject area of relevance to the business and who are individually motivated, exchange and develop knowledge. They also provide mutual support beyond the boundaries of their organizational units” (147). Knowledge Communities are seen as a great way to overcome hierarchal and organizational boundaries, business processes and project-specific boundaries, and temporal, geographical, and cultural boundaries. Furthermore, each Knowledge Community is an interactive process that goes through a certain life cycle divided up into three phases. The start-up phase begins with an initiating process, followed by preconsideration, identification and integration of community members, developing a community concept, and setting up a framework that ensures the workability of the community. The run and improve phase includes making sure that continuous improvement takes place, keeping momentum in order to sustain an active and constantly adapting Community focused on the constantly changing business environment. Finally, the winding-down phase occurs when a Knowledge Community’s goals are no longer applicable, shutting the Community down and transferring knowledge to other Communities or archiving the information for later use. There are three groups of roles in each Knowledge Community. A group in the Community itself composed of members, the organizer, and coordinator of the community activities constitutes one group. Additionally, interface roles link the Community to the formal organization, in this case Siemens, and other Knowledge Communities. Finally, Knowledge Community service groups provide services to Knowledge Communities without being directly involved in the knowledge sharing and creation process of the Community itself. Communication between these groups is essential, with a balance of face-to-face and virtual communication recommended to exploit the advantages that both methods have to offer. Furthermore, a basic framework of success factors is required to avoid knowledge sharing barriers, including: members with strong competency, a “we” attitude among the Community, focused and clearly defined core objectives, a recognized and organized facilitator, active members, support from the management, and clear communication channels.
The development and implementation of KCS began with a mission to support Knowledge Communities throughout their lifecycle, to facilitate the identification of Knowledge Communities, to facilitate the transformation of Siemens into a global network of knowledge and innovation, and to promote cooperation based on trust and communication between Communities. The activities of the KCS team can be grouped into six action fields, including: launching a KCS website to provide “self-help” for the whole KC lifecycle, promote KCs and their support within Siemens, install a KCS Hotline for Community members and facilitators, provide KC coaching jointly between departments in order to establish the same KC foundation, designing and implementing a Community@Siemens directory offering employees quick and user friendly ways of finding a desired Community, and to create detailed activity and role descriptions for Communities to support the various phases of the Knowledge Community lifecycle. Overall, the implementation of the Siemens Knowledge Community has been a great success and appears to be a vital part of the overall Siemens business structure.
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February 9, 2008 at 10:42 am
webbjy
I think Siemen’s Community Support was a good development. There were three phases for knowledge communities that were vital to the success of this idea.
1. The start-up: making people in the organization aware that there was a problem, and a need for improvement. In order to do this a business plan needs to be in place and a strategy needs to be form. The strategic vision of an organization is imperative in order for the success of knowledge communities (KCs).
2. Run & Improve: In order to keep the omentum of employees that are in KCs, lots of things need to take place. Employees must first be in a community that they share a common interest with them. That way knowledge sharing is not as forced as it might have been. Keeping employees excited about KCs is what will inevitably be the success or failure of this development project.
3. Winding-down: KCs should only exist as long as the employees and managers of a organization benefit from them. In the event that KCs are no longer needed in the different segments, in order to retain knowledge that was learned it should be transfered to other communities. That way knowledge can continue to grow.
I really liked the phases of KCs because Siemen’s really had a good vision for this plan. They knew what they wanted to achieve, while also having plans in case KCs weren’t as effective as they thought within the different communities.