» Institutionalizing Modern Communities of Practice: A Socio-Technical Perspective

Umar Ruhi

DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University, Canada


Presented: October 2004.

The pervasive use of Information and Communication technologies in organizations has transformed and revamped a number of traditional business models into their next generation e-enabled equivalents. This trend does not preclude the formation of new types of communities of practice at the workplace. Modern communities of practice allow their members to be connected through face-to-face interactions, or via networked communication media and offer a platform for the organizational development of knowledge, skills and competencies. This paper provides a conceptual model that integrates the organizational, cultural and technical facets in the implementation of modern communities of practice. Inspired from the social informatics discipline, it is theorized that an inclusive business strategy based on these facets can pave the way for the community of practice to progress from its early stages of inception to the point where it becomes adaptive to a constantly changing business environment.

Keywords: Virtual Communities of Practice, Evolution Model, Socio-technical Approach, Social Informatics.