Fourth and final stage in the life cycle of a community in the Public Administration context. Just as it happens with the seedling community of practice, strictly speaking a mature community of practice cannot be considered as genuine community of practice. In this final stage, the community itself, being now firmly consolidated, becomes invisible and devolves into the daily processes of administration. We are no longer dealing with a separate reference group of people involved in discussion and the creation of knowledge products which then revert to the community in a certain way, in this phase it is the organisation itself that act as a greater community of practice that in the daily development of their processes naturally absorbs strategies spun from the communities of practice. To put t another way, the community of practice ceases to be an internal point of reference within the organisation: it dissolves and is absorbed as a significant part of the DNA of the organisation itself.
Published in Chapter:
Communities of Practice in Public Administration: The Case of Catalonia’s Government
Mario Pérez-Montoro (University of Barcelona, Spain) and Jesús Martínez (Generalitat de Catalunya, Spain)
Copyright: © 2011
|Pages: 22
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-802-4.ch023
Abstract
Currently, Knowledge Management (KM) is being received very positively by organisations. Nevertheless, there is a particular type of organisation in which there has been less of a general demand for KM: the public organisations. However, in the last three years, a Knowledge Management project, based in communities of practice (CoPs), has been put into practice in the area of the Justice Department in the Catalan government, the Generalitat of Catalunya. The aim of this work is to present a detailed analysis of this project. To achieve this aim, first of all, we are going to introduce the implementation methodology and the results obtained, as well as the success variables involved in this project. This will allow us to offer a guide for implementing CoPs in public administration. Lastly, by way of conclusion, we will provide a series of conclusions and lessons that can easily be applied to the majority of community of practice projects that are implemented in the Public Administration context.