Prof. John Cordery (University of Western Australia)

Program

• Date: Cancelled
  Time:
  Location:

"Leveraging dispersed expertise through organizational communities of practice"

Organizations are increasingly making use of communities of practice (CoPs) as a way of leveraging the dispersed knowledge and expertise of their employees. One important way in which CoPs are predicted to benefit organizations is by facilitating the transfer of best practices. In this presentation, I report on the findings of several studies examining the operation and impact of the introduction of global CoPs within a large multinational minerals processing company over a period of more than five years. One of the studies I describe used Bayesian change point analysis to assess whether or not the introduction of global CoPs had a beneficial impact on local operations over a six year period. The results provide empirical support for the idea that CoPs benefit organizations operationally through the development and transmission of best practice operational routines.