MAIN BODY: KNOWLEDGE FLOWS IN COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE

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1
Identifying Knowledge Flows in Communities
of Practice
Oscar M. Rodríguez-Elias
CICESE, Mexico
Ana I. Martínez-García
CICESE, Mexico
Aurora Vizcaíno
University of Castilla-La Mancha, Mexico
Jesús Favela
CICESE, Mexico
Copyright © 2006, Idea Group Inc., distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI is prohibited.
INTRODUCTION
Knowledge sharing is a collective process where the
people involved collaborate with others in order to
learn from them (Huysman & de Wit, 2000). This
kind of collaboration creates groups of people with
common interest called communities of practice where
each member contributes knowledge about a com-
mon domain (Wenger, 1998).
Communities of practice enable its members to
benefit from the knowledge of each other (Fontaine
& Millen, 2004). To achieve this, different techniques
and technologies can be used, such as shared docu-
mentation, groupware tools, lessons learned systems,
and so forth. Therefore, to increase and improve
knowledge sharing in communities of practice, it is
important to study the mechanisms used by a particu-
lar community and understand how the knowledge
flows through its members (Guizzardi, Perini &
Dignum, 2003).
This article presents a qualitative approach for
studying and understanding how knowledge flows in
communities of practice within organizations. The
goal is to provide a methodological guide for obtaining
useful information for the development of knowledge
management tools for supporting knowledge flows in
these communities.
The content of the article is organized as follows.
First the importance of supporting knowledge flows in
communities of practice is highlighted. Then, a quali-
tative methodology for identifying knowledge flows in
communities of practice is described, followed by
some examples from a study conducted in the field of
software maintenance. Finally, we present our con-
clusions of this work and future research.
MAIN BODY: KNOWLEDGE FLOWS
IN COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE
In a knowledge-intensive organization, employees con-
stantly have to deal with a changing environment where
knowledge is crucial to make decisions and adapt to these
changes. To obtain the required knowledge for making
those decisions, employees generate communities where
each member collaborates with the others sharing knowl-
edge about a common domain. On the other hand, to
facilitate their adaptation, the organization’s processes
must become dynamic, that is, they must be designed to
change based on the knowledge involved and on the
activities performed by the members of the organization.
Knowledge management (KM) can help address this
issue, since it provides methods, techniques, and tools
for facilitating organizations to become adaptable to
these changing environments (Davenport & Prusak,
2000; Tiwana, 2000).
One of the main objectives of KM is to make
available the appropriate knowledge, in the right
place, at the right moment, to whoever needs it;
therefore the flow of knowledge is very important for
managing the knowledge of an organization (Nissen &
Levitt, 2002). In fact, it has been considered the
central component of a KM system (Borghoff &
Pareschi, 1998). Communities of practice stimulate

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Identifying Knowledge Flows in Communities of Practice
this flow of knowledge through organizations, since
knowledge flows easily in these communities because
they enable face-to-face interaction between their
members (Brown, 2002; Fontaine & Millen, 2004).
Even though direct interaction between members of
the community is very important for sharing their tacit
knowledge, other kinds of knowledge transfer must
be considered such as documents sharing. Hence,
provision of mechanisms that facilitate, increment,
and improve the transfers of both tacit and explicit
knowledge into communities of practice it is required.
Therefore, knowledge flow must be one of the most
important issues for supporting KM in these commu-
nities, since the goal is that the knowledge of each
member can be used by the others (Borghoff &
Pareschi, 1998; Guizzardi et al., 2003).
To provide support to the knowledge flow of a
community, it is important to identify specific issues
of the dynamics of knowledge flows in the processes
and activities performed by the members of that
community, as well as the social, cultural, and tech-
nological aspects which can affect those flows, in
order to provide useful insights for the definition of
requirements for designing KM systems that support
the flow of knowledge in the community (Rodríguez,
Martínez, Favela, Vizcaíno & Piattini, 2004a). A
process modeling approach, as used in business
processes reengineering (Curtis, Kellner & Over,
1992), can be appropriate for this purpose, since it
provides techniques for analyzing technological and
social aspects in organizations, as well as for modeling
the dynamics of their processes. Once identified and
understood how the knowledge flows through the
community and which are the main elements that
affect that flow, other approaches can be used for
implementing the support systems—for example, an
agent-oriented approach such as the proposed by
Guizzardi et al. (2003, 2004).
In the following section we present a qualitative
methodology for identifying knowledge flows in com-
munities of practice; this is a methodology that we
have defined and followed to obtain requirements for
the design of a KM support system for a software
maintenance group.
KOFI: A METHODOLOGY FOR
KNOWLEDGE FLOWS
IDENTIFICATION
To design and develop support systems, such as for
KM, for communities of practice, it is important to
consider the contextual issues of the customers or
those who will use the system (Beyer & Holtzblatt,
1998). We think knowledge flow must be a central
aspect for supporting communities of practice; there-
fore, to understand the context of those communities,
it is important to understand which kinds of knowl-
edge are important for the community, which knowl-
edge sources they share and how to obtain that
knowledge, which mechanisms they use to consult the
sources, and how all of these interact in the processes
and activities performed by the members of the
community—in general, how the knowledge flows
through the community (Rodríguez et al., 2004a). To
obtain answers for these questions, we have defined
a qualitative methodology to guide the process of
identifying how knowledge flows in a community of
practice, and how to provide support to facilitate,
increment, and improve the flow of knowledge in the
community by identifying the problems that affect
that flow.
Figure 1. Stages of the methodology for identifying knowledge flows
To
identify
knowledge sources
To
identify
kinds
of
knowledge
To
identify
knowledge flows
To
identify
problems
in
the
knowledge flow
To
identify
knowledge sources
To
identify
kinds
of
knowledge
To
identify
knowledge flows
To
identify
problems
in
the
knowledge flow

3
Identifying Knowledge Flows in Communities of Practice
1
THE METHODOLOGY
The methodology is composed of four stages, as
shown in Figure 1. In stage one the main sources of
knowledge and information are identified and classi-
fied (documents and people); then, in stage two, the
knowledge contained in those sources is also defined
and classified; in the third stage the main processes and
activities performed by the members of the commu-
nity are modeled to identify the people involved, how
they collaborate to complete their tasks, and how the
knowledge and sources interact in those activities;
finally, in stage four the main problems that can affect
the flow of knowledge are highlighted through the
definition of scenarios. The process proposed to carry
out the above stages is iterative, since each stage could
generate information to complement the others. For
example, if we identify a new kind of knowledge
source while we are modeling flows of knowledge, we
can add the source kind to the ontology and then
identify the kinds of knowledge that can be obtained
from it.
In the following subsections we describe more
details about each stage and present some examples
about how they can be carried out. These examples
have been obtained from a case study in a software
maintenance organization, where a multi-agent knowl-
edge management system was designed with require-
ments obtained from the results of the study (Rodríguez
et al., 2004a; Rodríguez, Vizcaino, Martínez, Piattini
& Favela, 2004b).
IDENTIFYING AND CLASSIFYING
KNOWLEDGE AND KNOWLEDGE
SOURCES
The first step starts by identifying the main docu-
ments and people involved in the community. Then,
in stage two, the documents are analyzed in order to
define the kinds of knowledge that can be obtained
from those, together with the kinds of knowledge that
the people involved can have or require for their
activities. Taxonomies can be defined to classify the
knowledge sources found and the kinds of knowl-
edge these sources have; also an ontology can be
designed to help define the relations between the
sources and the kinds of knowledge.
Ontologies are conceptual models for specifying
meanings or knowledge about a common domain;
they can be used to provide a framework for sharing
these meanings or knowledge (Gruber, 1995;
Maedche, Motik, Stojanovic, Studer & Volz, 2003).
Therefore, ontologies can be used for specifying
information sources and the knowledge they can
have, as well as the connections between them, in
order to develop a conceptual framework of these
relations.
Figure 2 presents a general ontology used for
classifying knowledge and its sources in the case
study carried out. This ontology is used for identify-
ing knowledge concepts (KConcept) which can be
both knowledge sources (KSource) or knowledge
Figure 2. A generic ontology of knowledge sources and knowledge topics
KConcept
KSource
KLevel
People
*
Product
*
Document
*
Support
Tool
*
Pyshical
Support
*
Location
knows_about
is_in
has
Email
PhoneNumber
PhysicalAddress
ElectronicAddress
DataBase
Format
*
has
Activity
*
Process
*
Affects
Generates/Modifies
Related
Located in
KTopic
Organization
’s domain
knowledge
*
Activities dependant
knowledge*
Organizational
knowledge
*
Processes
knowledge*
General
knowledge
*
Ontology
Concept
Sub
-
ontology
Name
Name
*
KConcept
KSource
KLevel
People
*
Product
*
Document
*
Support
Tool
*
Pyshical
Support
*
Location
knows_about
is_in
has
Email
PhoneNumber
PhysicalAddress
ElectronicAddress
DataBase
Format
*
has
Activity
*
Process
*
Affects
Generates/Modifies
Related
Located in
KTopic
Organization
’s domain
knowledge
*
Activities dependant
knowledge*
Organizational
knowledge
*
Processes
knowledge*
General
knowledge
*
Ontology
Concept
Sub
-
ontology
Name
Name
*
Physical Support*
Activities-Dependent
knowledge*
E-mail

4
Identifying Knowledge Flows in Communities of Practice
topics (KTopic). The knowledge concepts involved
in an activity can affect that activity in some way; for
example, in order to perform an activity, some knowl-
edge topics can be necessary or some knowledge
sources can be required; moreover, an activity can
generate or modify some topics or sources of knowl-
edge. Some elements of the ontology have been
defined as sub-ontologies, and their structure must be
specified for the particular needs of the studied
organization or community.
Knowledge sources can be people, documents,
support tools (such as organizational memories, expe-
rience repositories, etc.), and the products developed
or built by the organization. For example, in a soft-
ware organization, the systems developed (source
code and executable program) can be a very useful
source of knowledge. Each knowledge source can
have a specified physical support (such as paper,
electronic file, audiotape, videotape, etc.) and a
format (such as Word document, PowerPoint presen-
tation, etc.); they can also have one or more locations
which define how they can be consulted; and finally,
the sources have a level of knowledge about knowl-
edge topics or other knowledge sources.
Knowledge topics have been classified in five
main groups:
1. those related to the organization’s domain knowl-
edge, for example, if the organization develops
software for telephonic services management, it
must know about the call fees of the different
kinds of calls of each telephone company;
2. knowledge about the structure of the organiza-
tion, its norms, its culture, and so forth;
3. knowledge about the processes of the organi-
zation, for example, the activities, the people
involved, and so forth;
4. knowledge dependent of specific activities, for
example the procedures or support tools used for
performing the activity, and so forth; and
5. other kinds of knowledge that can be important,
for example, it can be useful to know which
employees speak foreign languages or have
other skills that are not used in their daily work.
This ontology can be used for defining and classi-
fying the kinds and sources of knowledge and how all
these are related. This information can be later used
for defining the structure of a knowledge base, for
example, by specifying the most important knowledge
topics for the organization, the sources of knowledge
available and the kinds of knowledge that can be
obtained from those sources.
In the third stage of the methodology, we have
followed a process modeling approach to identify the
flows of knowledge by modeling the activities per-
formed by the community, the knowledge required
and generated in the activities, the people in charge of
them, and the sources of knowledge used, modified,
or generated during the activities. This approach is
presented in the following section.
KNOWLEDGE FLOWS MODELING
A process modeling (Curtis et al., 1992) approach can
be very useful to identify how the knowledge and
Figure 3. An example of a model of activities performed by members of a maintenance group
Chief of the
department
Project
leader
Modification
Request
Work Project
Plan
Project
Documentation
Software
engineers
Defining
Modifications Plan
Documenting
the Project
•
Available resources
•
Estimated time and cost
•
Modules of the system that
could be modified
•
Activities to perform
•
Requirements
•
Resources assigned
•
Resources required
•
Project goals
•
Estimated time and cost
•Time and cost restrictions
•Available resources
•Time and cost estimation
•System structure
•Tasks that need to be done
•More suitable people for the
project
•
Experience with the system to be
maintained
•
Time that can take the
modifications
Chief of the
department
Chief of the
department
Project
leader
Project
leader
Modification
Request
Work Project
Plan
Project
Documentation
Software
engineers
Software
engineers
Defining
Modifications Plan
Documenting
the Project
•
Available resources
•
Estimated time and cost
•
Modules of the system that
could be modified
•
Activities to perform
•
Requirements
•
Resources assigned
•
Resources required
•
Project goals
•
Estimated time and cost
•Time and cost restrictions
•Available resources
•Time and cost estimation
•System structure
•Tasks that need to be done
•More suitable people for the
project
•
Experience with the system to be
maintained
•
Time that can take the
modifications
•Time that the modifications
can take

5
Identifying Knowledge Flows in Communities of Practice
1
sources of information are involved in the activities
performed by the community. To do this, the main
activities of the processes carried out by the commu-
nity must be identified, as well as the decisions that the
people involved must make while they perform those
activities. A graphical modeling technique, such as
rich picture (Monk & Howard, 1998), can be used to
model these activities. Rich pictures are cartoon-like
representations that identify actors, roles, their con-
cerns, and some of the structure underlying the work
context. Thus, these kinds of representations can be
useful to model the people and roles involved in some
activities, the knowledge required by them to perform
the activities, and the sources they consult or those
that could have information to help them to complete
their activities. These models can be later used to
analyze how the knowledge flows through the group
while its members perform their activities.
Figure 3 illustrates an example of a graphical
model, which shows the main activities performed in
the definition of the modification plan carried out by
the group studied. The model shows the people
involved in those activities, the knowledge they have
together with their relevance to the activities modeled,
and the main sources used, created, or modified in the
activities.
Once the activities have been modeled, the next
step is to define the decisions that must be made by
the people involved. To do that, we used the schema
shown in Table 1. This schema helps to identify the
knowledge that the people in charge of the activities
must have to make the decisions required, and the
sources they consult to obtain information that helps
them to make those decisions. At this step, it is
important to identify the mechanisms that people can
use to consult the sources, as well as those used to
Table 1. Schema used to identify knowledge in decision making
Table 2. An example of a problem description scenario and an alternative scenario
Role
Activity
Previous projects
documentation
Resources required by previous projects
Documents' files,
modifications' logbook
Chief of the department
Available resources; time and cost
restrictions
Telephone, Physical
address, Email
Software engineers
Experience with the system that will be
modified; time that could consume the
modifications; time availability
Telephone, Physical
address, Email
Sources of information
Name
Information
Consulted at
Knowledge
Previous projects experiences
Requirements and restrictions of the project
Abilities and experience of each of the possible participants of the project
Project leader
To define modification plan
Decision
To define required resources
To define main tasks to perform
To assign tasks to the participants of the project
To estimate the time the project would consume
Previous projects' experiences
Previous projects'
documentation
Kind:
Expert finding (knowledge sources management)
Problem description:
Alternative:
Mary
is
a
software
engineer
that
must
make
some
changes
in
the
finances
system.
Since
her
knowledge
in the
domain
of
finances
is
not
good
enough,
the
changes
to
the
system
are
taking
more
than
a
week
of
the estimated
time.
At
the
end
of
the
week,
Susan,
the
chief
of
the
department,
while
she
was
checking
the
advances
of
the
project,
detects
the
delay
and
asks
Mary
the
reasons
of
that
delay.
Mary
tells
Susan
the
problem
and
since
Susan
has
experience
with
finances,
she
tells
Mary
how
the
problem
could
be
solved.
Finally, Mary solves the problem the same day.
When
Mary
decides
to
solve
the
problem
of
the
finances
system,
the
tool
where
Mary
manages
her
tasks
detects
this
action.
This
tool
knows
about
Mary's
knowledge,
and
identifies
the
kind
of
knowledge
that
Mary needs
to
make
the
changes
in
the
finances
system,
so
the
tool
identifies
that
Mary
probably
will
need
to consult
some
sources
of
knowledge
and
decides
to
search
for
those
sources
to
help
Mary
do
her
Job.
The tool
founds
some
sources
that
can
be
relevant
to
the
task
Mary
will
perform,
thus
the
tool
informs
Mary
about
it.
Then,
Mary
decides
to
see
the
kind
of
knowledge
those
sources
can
have,
and
based
on
that, decides to consult Susan who is one of the sources found by the tool.

6
Identifying Knowledge Flows in Communities of Practice
share the knowledge generated in the activities—for
example, the documentation of the modifications’
plan in Figure 3.
The analysis of the activities performed by the
members of the community, using the graphical
model and the information from the tables, are later
used to understand how the knowledge flows through
the community, and what techniques they use to share
and obtain that knowledge. Finally this analysis can
help to identify the problems that are affecting that
flow. We next describe how scenarios can be used for
this purpose.
SCENARIOS FOR IDENTIFYING
FAULTS IN THE KNOWLEDGE
FLOWS
In the fourth stage of the methodology, the models
generated in the previous phase are analyzed to find
the problems that could be affecting the flow of
knowledge—for example, if the information gener-
ated from the activities is not captured, or if there are
sources that could help in performing some activities,
but they are not consulted by the people in charge. In
this stage, problem scenarios can help identify how
the problems detected affect the knowledge flow, and
how these could be addressed. These problem sce-
narios could be later used to obtain design require-
ments to the development of tools to address these
problems, since scenarios enable the identification of
design requirements for software systems and make
feasible the participation of users during the require-
ments specification stage (Chin, Rosson & Carroll,
1997).
A scenario is a textual description of the activities
that people might engage in while pursuing a particular
concern (Carroll & Rosson, 1992). Hence, the prob-
lem scenarios can be structured as a story of particu-
lar problems detected from the analysis of the infor-
mation obtained in the previous stages. Then these
scenarios can be studied in order to discuss how those
problems can be tackled. Table 2 presents an example
of the description of a problem scenario obtained
from the group studied and an alternative scenario
where the knowledge sources are provided by a
system. These kinds of descriptions can provide
insights, which can later be used for defining require-
ments for developing support tools focused on ad-
dressing the problems identified.
As we mentioned before, the methodology has
been applied in a case study in the software mainte-
nance field (Rodríguez et al., 2004a). The first two
phases of the methodology helped us to identify the
main knowledge sources available for the members of
the maintenance groups, as well as the kinds of
knowledge these sources have. This information was
useful for developing a knowledge base to help find
knowledge sources for maintainers to do their jobs.
Then, the third phase guided us in identifying the
activities where these sources are involved, the kinds
of knowledge required or generated in those activities,
and the mechanisms maintainers used to consult those
sources or to obtain the required knowledge; that is,
this last phase helped us to identify how the knowl-
edge was flowing in the maintenance community.
Finally, the scenarios defined in the fourth phase were
used to obtain design requirements to develop a
knowledge management system for helping
maintainers to reduce the loss and waste of knowledge
by facilitating the search of knowledge sources related
to the activities they perform (Rodríguez et al., 2004a,
2004b).
CONCLUSION AND FUTURE
POSSIBILITIES
The flow of knowledge is a very important factor for
communities of practice, since one of the goals of
these communities is to provide an environment
where their members could share knowledge with
others in order to learn together. Thus, for providing
support to these communities, we think that the flow
of knowledge through their members must be consid-
ered a central aspect of the design of the support tools.
To address these issues, in this article we presented
a qualitative methodology for studying how the knowl-
edge flows through communities of practice in orga-
nizations, and how to identify the problems that can
be affecting that flow, in order to use all this informa-
tion to provide tools to support the flow of knowledge
between the members of a community. The proposed
methodology has been applied in a case study in a
software maintenance group, where an appropriate
knowledge management system according to the
results obtained in this study has been designed.

7
Identifying Knowledge Flows in Communities of Practice
1
We think it is important to consider the particular
aspects of each community to provide better support
for its particular needs. Thus, it is important to
identify the knowledge needed by the members of the
community, the sources they use to obtain that
knowledge, the particular processes and activities
carried out by them, as well as the main decisions they
must make. All these aspects are considered by the
proposed methodology.
Nevertheless, in order for the methodology to be
more useful, we consider it necessary to provide tools
for managing the information obtained by applying
it—for instance, tools for defining the structure of
the ontology of knowledge and knowledge sources,
and for capturing information about the specific
knowledge topics and sources in a knowledge base
that could be later used by the tools developed to
support the community. At the moment, we are
working on providing this kind of support for the
methodology.
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KEY TERMS
Graphical Process Modeling Technique: A tech-
nique for representing models of processes with a
graphical notation.
Knowledge Concept: A concept that is part of an
ontology used for defining and describing the knowl-
edge related with a community, such as the kinds of
knowledge or the sources of knowledge.
Knowledge Flow: Defines how the knowledge
flows through the activities performed by a commu-
nity according to the kinds of knowledge and knowl-
edge sources involved in the activities, the mecha-
nisms used by the people involved in the activity to
obtain or share that knowledge, and so forth.
Knowledge Source: A source of information
which can be useful to obtain knowledge for practi-
cal application such as know-how, know-what, know-
where, and so forth—for example, lessons learned
or members of the community.
Knowledge Topic: Definition of a particular
area of knowledge useful for a person or the mem-
bers of a community.
Ontology: An explicit and formal representation
of a shared conceptualization. Ontologies are concep-
tual models for specifying meanings or knowledge
about a common domain.
Problem Scenario: A textual description of a
problem observed in a community studied, which has
the form of a story that illustrates the problem and
possible solution alternatives.
Process Modeling: Collection of techniques used
to model systems’ behavior. These models help in
analyzing the current state of organizations as facili-
tators of organizational learning.