Do communities of practice HAVE to show tangible value in order to be funded?

Hi all,
Thank you to the person who responded to my posting and provided their point of view. I truly value your interaction.

The issue you speak about,

"What if formal structures have actually begun to prevent the organization from achieving its purpose? Even great leaders atop the formal chart can't seem to overcome the inertia. By bringing the informal social systems like networks and communities of practice under formal organizational control, we actually limit the
power of the informal to make a positive difference for people and society."

is the one that forward thinkers are now concerned about. It seems that in our wonderful capitalistic economy every time something innovative is discovered, especially innovation that leads to returns, corporate capitalism is just waiting there to absorb it into the mainstream. And I agree with you, sometimes that kills the effort completely.

So at one end we could say finally KM and CoPs are becoming part of mainstream and being realized as value add activities, but on the other hand the very nature of CoPs is such that if it loses its edge when it gets absorbed into mainstream.

I am sure this is not a debate anyone can win per se, just an articulation of different points of view.

farida

Is structure harming communities?

Hi all, this comment was posted on the blog and I think its a great discussion topic so I wanted to answer it on the blog itself as a primary entry.

"I'm wondering if you agree with the APQC KM Roadmap to Success idea that the culmination for org KM is institutionalizing KM. I am particularly interested in your thoughts on institutionalizing communities of practice.

Remember Etienne Wenger and William Snyder's HBS article in 2000 called CoP: The Organizational Frontier? In that article they describe the managerial dilemma of supporting CoPs without destroying them. I loved the story of the farmer who killed the golden goose to get at the gold.

I'm wondering if we are not heeding Wenger and Snyder's warnings. If the formal organization coopts informal social systems, aren't they killing the golden goose?"

My thoughts

In our earlier study on "Building & Sustaining Communities of Practice" this concern is exactly what we had articulated in the closing section of the report. That is, if organizations start managing communities heavily then they will lose their sense of being a community and start feeling like another business unit.

I have thoughts that go both ways on this argument. In our recent study on CoPs what was clear among organizations was that communities had to display tangible value in order to continue to be funded. This begged the argument that expectation of tangible value meant imposing a structure on the community and many organizations have in fact done that. So if I follow the "purist" thought process that a community is a group of individuals that come together because they want to and not because they have to then one can assume that in this new structured CoP there will exist both types of individuals. Most of them hopefully will participate because they want to, because they see the inherent value to their jobs and their lives but there will also be some that will join because they have to due to management visibility. Does this intermingling then of voluntary and involuntary membership change the fact that it is still a community? I am open to anyone who wants to comment on that. My thought is no...it doesn't. Maybe its a modified community structure but the base goal of the community is still the same. That is, to share knowledge that others want.

Where the analogy of killing the golden goose is concerned, we do find communities that die as a result of increased management attention but in most cases if the community is in fact the golden goose then management finds people who are willing to commit to outcomes to start up a community. In such cases the people who did not want the management attention shy away from the community and those who can handle it participate.

Another interesting change among our partner organizations was the recognition that CoPs could in fact take many forms. There are groups of people who just want to meet and talk and not worry about outcomes. For them the converstaion is enough. In such cases management says "its ok to continue to do that, just don't ask us for money, because if you do then you have to justify the expense." Then there are groups of people that don't mind the outcomes and want increased visibility in the organization. Just the fact that they have structured outcomes does not make them any less of a community. They are still like minded people, they still like talking to each other and sharing, the only difference is they are taking their knowledge sharing to knowledge creation and dissemination that impacts the organization's botom line.
So organizations are starting to understand both these types of communities and are supporting both of them.

I hope I have provided enough information to your comment. I thank you for taking the time to respond to my postings.
take care
farida

"Phishing"

Hi all, I subscribe to John Patrick's blog (I have added his blog as a link on mine). He is President of Attitude LLC and former VP of Internet Technology for IBM. He travels a lot and writes very interesting excerpts on his travels and thoughts about technology. So after hoarding my knowledge about his blog for this long I am shamefully now sharing it with you.
My impetus to do so is based on the topic for today. Patrick has an interesting entry about "phishing" especially the ones that seem they are coming from eBay or Paypal. I know I receive at least one or two a day, threatening e-mails saying that unless I verify my account with eBay it will be suspended. And believe me its difficult to delete those without hesitating and thinking they may be valid. Rest assured they are not. Patrick has done a great job outlining the issue so I am including a link to his blog entry on the topic.

Phishing - Part 4

As always comments are most welcome

Memorial Day Content

Its a three day weekend here in the States. Yeah! I am so excited. I can't wait to get out of here and be gone for three days. I know a lot of you feel that way too so I hope you relax and have a wonderful weekend.
Couple of things before I go. A lot of you have visited the KSN and some of you have even registered. For those that have I am looking into repackaging some of the content and selling it at a package price. Don't know all the details yet but we are starting to explore the idea of selling the content in small chunks to non members. What I would love to hear from you on would be ideas or links to other sites where you have purchased piecemeal content from and liked the experience. Please let me know, it will help me get a feel for how to go about putting the content packages together.

Second of course I cannot leave you without content to read for the weekend. Here are a couple of interesting pieces we recently published on the KSN. Enjoy!

How Blogs can help KM
The 10 most wanted motivation killers

Have a safe and enjoyable weekend.

May 2005 KM Conference Presentations

Hey all, remember I said I was in St. Louis at my own KM Conference. We had some really exciting speakers and we finally have the presentations posted on the site. Of course its nothing like being there but for those of you who weren't there, I hope you decide to attend next year.

You don't have to be registered to view the presentations but if you do register on the KSN at Register Now send me an e-mail and let me know, I will send you a surprise gift in the mail. Promise!! its useful.
Farida

KM Conference Presentations, May 2005

I Blog for Knowledge

Hello all, back in balmy Houston where the highs have already reached 80+ degrees and humidity is around the same. But it's home what can I say.
I wanted to focus this entry on the topic of blogging itself. In my second to last post I wrote a bit about the issues with blogging and I want to continue that topic somewhat and also intersperse it with the increased interest in blogging as an approach for knowledge management and knowledge sharing. I beefed up the presentation that I linked to in my earlier post a bit and delivered pretty much the same message to my conference attendees in St. Louis last week that I had shared with the folks from the eGov conference.
So first of all just to give you some perspective, our conference had 285 attendees. The track that my session was held in had 4 other speakers. My meeting planner gave me a small room probably thinking, yeah she'll get 25 or so, you know some spill over from the other tracks. Was she in for a surprise? The room was packed, standing room only. That in itself is an indicator of the popularity of the topic. Very few, almost none of the attendees were small or single consultancies. Almost all of them were knowledge managers like you and me grappling with how to get people to share knowledge in the enterprise.
So blogs are starting to get some serious attention within corporations and they are looking at blogs as an approach to support knowledge sharing efforts. As you have seen in the presentation many companies are starting to use blogs effectively to share information. This trend is especially strong in organizations that have project based delivery and have project managers, teams, or people on the road delivering services.
There are a few key points I want to share with you in case you are trying to sell the concept of blogs to your company.
1) Blogs are updated frequently. Even I (delinquent as I am) try to update my blog at least once a week which means that if I were writing to share knowledge within my organization I would have contributed at least 52 content items.
2) Blogs point out the experts. Because blogs are individual opinion based, you know the material on the blog is from the blogger's brain. If what he/she says means something to you or works for you then the blogger is building credibility and expertise in the area they are writing about.
3)This I think is the key point. The blogs are not necessarily the KM tool. The RSS feed is. This was shared by Patrick Lambe from my listsrv. Think about it, he is absolutely right. If a large percentage of your employees start blogging, then blogs by themselves are no different than individual databases. The value is in having a tool that allows you to select all the blogs that you are interested in and getting a consolidated post of all the new items posted on the topics that interest you. That tool is none other than RSS.

My other topic that I covered during this session was on Wikis. Talk about open mouths. For those who had no concept what a wiki was were aghast at the idea that there are sites out there that allow anyone to edit anything on the site anonymously. "Control" is a major factor in our organizations. The whole idea of not having control over what someone posts or edits is something that will take a long time to take hold in traditional companies.
I saw a couple of optimal situations in which wikis could be used. One, they can be used in a closed project setting to discuss topics or ideas (almost like a collaboration space) but one that has a memory. Its used to house what people may learn on the project or something they need to develop. Second would be a broader application of the same concept that is using the wiki to gather knowledge from the organization. Especially in a community setting I can see the administrator putting out a topic in a wiki and everyone contributing thoughts, issues, concerns, experiences and expertise to it. Then a subject matter expert can use that raw content to build a “usable” content piece that can be added to the knowledge repository. When I use the word “usable” I am implying that the subject matter expert has vetted the information so that if someone decides to reuse or apply the ideas in the content item they know that its valid information.
So as usual my plea for interaction. If anyone has issues, concerns or thoughts they want to share please don’t hold back. Until next time, farida

2005 Communities of Practice Study

Wow! That study ended yesterday. What a powerful session. I guess all the sleepless nights were worth it after all. I've kept you posted on all the partner organizations that we visited. What we do at the end of a study is to get everyone together in a room to discuss the findings. All the best practice partners are invited and all the companies who sponsored the study are invited. Talk about a great community, everyone comes to learn and share openly and freely their experiences good and bad, they don't hesitated to share why they fell flat on their faces when they tried certain things and how they recovered.
So here are some brief bullet points from the Executive Summary. Realize that this report is not out for another four months so what you are getting is a major early preview.

Communities are now allowing organizations to communicate and execute their strategy and refine their competencies;

Communities are being seen as providing the speed and enabling the innovation needed for marketplace leadership and positioning;

Communities are integrated into the fabric of the organization's core work and value chain;

Organizations are adopting the strategy of aligning their communities more closely with their formal governance structure;

Tools and methods of community building and management have matured and become a central competency with their own center of excellence;and

Managers, executives, and subject matter experts are personally engaged in sustaining communities.

The stories told by partner organizations were compelling and truly successful. Lots of money has been saved in these organizations by the implementation of communities of practice.
If you are considering implementing CoPs in your organization, call us. We would love to help you through this. Sorry to sound like a commercial but we have learned a lot and we can really help make a difference in your efforts at enabling communities of practice.
As always if you have comments on these very high level findings write me. Lets start a dialogue. Have you implemented communities in your organization? Are they working or not? Let me know. I love to learn.
Gotta go now or will be late for the key note who happens to be my president. You know when its the pres, you gotta be there.
Will share more later

Presentation at eGov

Hey all, reporting from the road this beautiful Thursday morning. I'm in St. Louis for our annual KM conference and just got through with the final knowledge transfer session for my study on communities of practice. So I will break up what's being going on into multiple posts or else it won't make any sense.
First, I spoke about blogs at eGov in DC. It was pretty cool, a lot of people are interested in blogs but are not sure how to work with it. I had a room full of people, at least a 100 or more and they were bustling with questions on blogs, wikis and IM, you know general real-time type collaboration stuff.
The issues with blogs in the workplace today are the same issues we were facing with the Internet. That is, oh my! this is a completely "open" medium how in the world are we going to control it. Remember that. There were discussions and fear about how the Internet would impact our organizations and that employees would spend time surfing the Internet and no work would get done. And the answer is yes, we all had to go through a few painful experiences of misuse of the Internet or rather abuse of the Internet but it all smoothed out pretty nicely.
Thats the same fear with blogs, oh my! employees are going to say whatever they want on the blogs and how can we maintain control over the integrity of the information that goes out. Like all new "stuff" this too will work itself out after faltering a bit.
The key here is that organizations have to keep their end of the bargain and not stifle expression but guide it.
Did you all read the article on Technorati. I have to say I am very disappointed with their management. Getting their employee to take down the picture on his blog when they themselves are in business purely because of blogs is a true shame. Shame on you Technorati management. If you'll would like to comment I would be very interested. If you don't know what I'm talking about send me a mail and I will find the link to the article for you.

Anyway, need to quit rambling and give you the link to the presentation at eGov. You can find the presentation here.

eGov Conference in DC

Sorry about the multiple postings today, if I don't do it right away I forget. Both Wesley Vestal and I are presenting at the eGov conference in DC on April 22nd. Wes is presenting on KM and Organizational Learning and I on blogs of course.

If anyone would like to attend the conference, eGOv is offering APQC a 25% discount. If you are interested please write me for the discount code. You can get more information about the eGov conference at their site.

APQC's Knowledge Management Conference

If you have not already registered for APQC's conference please do so quickly as it is filling up fast. We got a record 80 registrations in 3 days last week.
Its being held in St. Louis this year and is on May 5th and 6th.
You can find details at APQC's Web site. Click on the banner at the top of the page.

Communities of Practice - progress on the study

Site visits are complete and we are in the midst of writing the final report. Based on the past study, the big difference this time was the confidence factor. Communities of practice are here to stay. They are not a temporary experiment or pilot, they are recognized as organizational structures that lead to business results.

Another interesting observation was with regards to technology. There was no focus on fancy technology to support communities. Partner organizations have made investments in acquiring some missing functionality such as collaboration space (only if the community requires it) but mostly they are using their own existing systems building on capabilities to support their communities.

One dissapointing factor for me was that none of the partner organizations are actively using blogs within their organizations or within their communities to share knowledge.

Communities of Practice at the Federal Highway Administration

Hey! You know those rumble strips that are on the side of the road that wake you up when you drive off... the implementation of those are credited to communities of practice at the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). The FHWA is an interesting agency, in case you are wondering what the W in their acronym stands for its for Way in highway. That one got me too.
FHWA does not build the roads, they oversee the safety aspect for land, air, water, and railroads. They ensure that the nation’s transport system is safe for public use, or they oversee the safety of civil aviation, and they monitor and operate the waterways for trading. It's like that BASF advertisment that used to come on, "We don't make the product, we make the product better."

So knowledge is their only asset. They have knowledge of how to build safe roads and waterways and their job is to impart that knowledge to agencies at the local level so they can comply with the safety requirements. FHWA therefore chose communities of practice as their approach of choice to enable this knowledge transfer.

Well, they have all the good habits of other successful best practice partner organizations, such as executive buy-in, strong community administrators, etc., but FHWA has two things the others don’t have. One is public communities and two is a balanced scorecard for measuring the effectiveness of their community program. Being a government agency they want to engage their constituents and hear what they have to say and they do that through their communities. For instance there is a community that caters to people who are going to be displaced as a result of land acquisition for highways. The community gives its constituents a forum to express concerns. So FHWA has spent some time figuring out how to interact with public forums and has had to deal with educating its workforce on what can and cannot be shared on public forums.

The Balanced Scorecard approach, (they call it that and they have tried to keep the quadrants as close to the "original" balanced scorecard as possible) has four quadrants. Customer results, Business results, Initiative growth and processes, and outreach and leadership activities. FHWA captures results under each of these quadrants and tries to quantify as much of it as they can very conservatively for reporting purposes. As a result of their structured approach to measuring outcomes, communicating with senior leaders about the continued effectiveness of communities of practice has become very easy. After all if saving lives is in your mission statement, you have to find every possible means of making that happen.

Hope you all have a great weekend and a Very Happy Easter to all.

Communities of Practice at Arup Engineering

Have you heard of Arup Engineering? If not, look up the Sydney Opera House, Arup made that design happen. I don't know if it’s the nature of their business or if it’s their founder that makes Arup one of the most innovative organizations I have been to. To give you a sense of the legacy left behind by Sir Ove Arup, here is an excerpt from his "retirement" speech that is handed to every new employee walking in the door.
"There are two ways of looking at the work you do to earn a living:
One is the way propounded by the late Henry Ford: Work is a necessary evil, but modern technology will reduce it to a minimum. Your life is your leisure lived in your “free” time.
The other is:
To make your work interesting and rewarding, you enjoy both your work and your leisure.

We opt uncompromisingly for the second way.”

Sir Ove Arup’s firm belief was that his company would not make money at any cost. A legacy like that creates a natural culture of sharing and “small company” feel even though Arup is 7,000 employees strong. Its no wonder then that communities of practice thrive at Arup. But don’t get me wrong, its not all “huggy-kissy,” its still pure business. They are a highly matrixed organization just like many others today but their communities break down communication barriers and create an environment for sharing.

One of the keys to Arup’s success with communities is not just its culture but the recognition of several roles that have to exist within a community in order for it to thrive. In most organizations you will find a community leader/administrator, members, and subject matter experts. Other peripheral roles such as content manager or librarian will crop in and out as the community needs it. At Arup, roles such as political champion, activist, and technology leader also exist to ensure that the community has the support it needs to function.

An example of innovation is one of “Fire Engineering.” How many organizations can say they influenced the creation of a whole new field of engineering. Arup can. And that too with one person. One engineer who found it very important to study the “fire load” on structures pushed Arup to create a practice in that area. The idea is that buildings should be tested for fire load just as they are tested for structural load. Fire Engineering is a new discipline being taught in universities today.

Communities of Practice at Air Products and Chemicals Corporation

My next stop after Ernst& Young was Air Products and Chemicals in Allentown, PA. Brrrrr... boy it was cold. I almost lost my fingers that night. That's because I am after all a summer baby, having lived in Mumbai India and then warm Houston, Texas all my life I had no gloves with me. So of course when I had to walk outside for 10 minutes trying to find and then drive the rental car around town I sat warming my poor blue hands for at least 20 minutes before I could do anything. So much for that.
Air Products and Chemicals (APCI) is an interesting organization. They have been APQC members and study participants for a long time. Air Products is one of the largest industrial gas producers, supplying a broad range of industrial gases, mainly oxygen, nitrogen, argon, hydrogen, and helium. These gases are used in most industries, including food and metal processing, semiconductor manufacturing, healthcare, aerospace and chemical production.
Communities of Practice are the primary approach for knowledge sharing at APCI. They have an interesting model of Communities of Interest, Communities of Practice and Centers of Excellence. Each level of community addresses a particular need within the organization. This is based on their realization that even in communities one size does not necessarily fit all so they created three buckets to fit the needs of their organizations. Their advice to us was the same. Understand your organization, its culture and the needs of your employees and then design the best KM solution to suit their needs. APCI presents at some of our conferences so keep an eye out, they are worth listening to.

Ernst & Young's Knowledge Management Efforts

On Tuesday last week we visited Ernst & Young in Cleveland. APQC had originally studied Cap Gemini Ernst & Young in our previous study on Building and Sustaining Communities of Practice and we were very impressed by their efforts to institutionalize, to embed knowledge sharing in their culture. I wondered if Ernst & Young by itself would have continued the efforts.
I am glad to report that they have. The Center for Business Knowledge is still alive and well and in part revitalized because of recent regulations concerning audit and compliance.
Knowledge Sharing at E&Y is a mega process. This means that it gets "strategic" attention and therefore resources, and it is expected behavior of every employee. The CBK offerings are divided into "standard" and "custom." Standard offerings such as communities of practice deployment and support and technology are funded at the corporate level. If a practice area wants a custom application or solution then the CBK charges back the cost to that area.
As I mentioned earlier, communities of practice fall within CBK's standard delivery model and include chartering, planning, identifying stakeholders and deploying communities. After that the CBK takes on a monitoring role to help keep the communities focused and active.
If I had one salient point to pick out about their initiative, it would be focus. The CBK's is strongly focused on ensuring that knowledge sharing is embedded into the company culture and they do everything in their power to nudge people into that.

Communities of Practice at Fluor Corporation

Hello all, reporting from the road. Visited Fluor Corporation last week in Aliso Viejo, California. What a phenomenal place, I mean both the location and the organization. The KM team at Fluor is running and gunning with their initiative. They have a well planned strategy but more important than that is the fact that they are deploying the strategy according to the plan. I have attended many site visits in my years at APQC and if I had to pick out a couple of salient points that make these organizations stellar I would say 1) the team has passion, and 2) they roll up their sleeves and get the work done. The team at Fluor works really hard to make sure that they are providing complete support to their communities of practice. They have clearly identified roles and responsibilities in their communities and all the support staff comes through to help push, prod, pull, whatever it takes to keep the community running. Sorry I cannot share details with you until the study is released to the public. Fluor has spoken at other public conferences and if anyone knows a link to a presentation let me know and I will link to it.

I have also visited Ernst & Young and will be visiting Air Products and Chemicals tomorrow. Signing off from freezing Allentown for now.
farida

Knowledge Management at Turner Construction

Folks, want to bring your attention to a cool article we released last month. Its about how Turner Construction Co., a partner in APQC's Integrating Knowledge Management and Organizational Learning study and the largest commercial builder in the United States, ensures its employees have access to the training and tacit knowledge they need to perform their jobs? According to James Mitnick, a senior vice president at Turner, the organization focuses on performance-based learning. Read about the learning network Turner has built to bring learning, knowledge, and collaboration together to drive the company's performance.

If you want access to more articles like these all you have to do is register on the KSN, that is my site. Remember there is no cost to register, if you are not a member you will get non member access and you won't have access to some of the members only content.

Are you a member of APQC?

If you read my blog but don't know if your organization is a member of APQC please contact me or go to my site and click on Membership and Current members. I am bringing this to your attention again because I have so many resources on the site for KM and communities and it would be a shame if your organization is a member and you just didn't know it. If your organization is already a member then there is no cost at all to access the research.
So, if you are a member, please click on Register Here on the main page and fill out the registration form and get access to the Knowledge Sharing Network. Once you are in you can click on Community space, look for the KM community and get access to all the community call presentations I have had over the past 2 years.
I just had a call today on Social Network Analysis. A very interesting approach to understanding networks within organizations. The question is are SNAs an effective means of identifying groups within an organization that are ripe for creating a community? I would love to hear your opinion on that . Also whether you agree or disagree please share with me your thoughts on Social Network Analysis. Anyone have a cool story to share of implementing or not implementing social network analysis in your organization? I would love to hear from you.

What has Farida been up to since November?

My last post was in November sometime and I mentioned something about creating a blog strategy. So here goes... I did get my blog reviewed and got some guidance on little things I can do to have my blog picked up by search engines. If you are interested contact Bill Ives (his blog is linked on mine) and get Amanda's information. If you are already a savvy blogger you probably don't need a review.

A lot has happened since November, the most interesting of which is my role in the latest study on Communities of Practice as mechanisms of organizational effectiveness and innovation. Tall order for communities eh! But why not? If communities are going to play in the main tent, then they must show ROI just like the rest of the process improvement approaches in the marketplace. Now the study costs $16,000 to participate but I already have 23 sponsors, so you know that the topic is pretty hot these days. I am not sure if everyone knows how APQC runs its studies so I will give you a brief methodology overview.
The sponsors come together with APQC and we design a survey instrument to gather information that the sponsor group is interested in. APQC then finds 10-12 organizations that fit the bill of "best-practice" organizations that matches the scope of the study. In this case organizations that have used CoPs to enable organizational effectiveness and innovation. The sponsor group then chooses 5 of these organizations to site visit. A site visit is a face to face meeting with CoP practitioners for a day (6 hours or so. After all 5 site visits, APQC analyzes the data, writes a final report and finishes the study with a Knowledge Transfer Session in which all the sponsors and best-practice organizations get together in a 2 day networking session.
So, if you are interested in joining the study don't hesitate to call. I start traveling on site visits next week and my first visit is to Fluor Corporation in Orange County, CA. Poor me, I have to go to California:-))
The remaining organizations selected are Air Products & Chemicals, Arup Engineering, Ernst & Young and Federal Highway Administration. We will have finished site visits by March 16. Phew! My travel schedule is going to be a bear over the next two weeks.

Actually I am really really excited about this study and am looking forward to finding new and innovative lessons learned from these partners. I am the acting subject matter expert on the study and have to write the final report so I am really hoping that good things will come from the site visits. And they always do so no worries.

So, I am back on track and I will be posting regularly again so stay tuned. I will keep you posted on site visits, maybe see if I can encourage some discussions of findings, and although I cannot share the final report with all of you I can most certainly share some high level lessons learned.

Communities of Practice ROI

Can one truly measure the return on investment on communities? I guess the answer is it depends. It depends on what the goals of the community are. This past month I had been tasked with return on investment proof for my community. The question specifically posed to me was not what is the impact of the APQC KM community but how or does the APQC KM Community impact the bottom line and how.

So I set out to find correlations between community members and their behaviors. My first attempt was at purchasing behavior. I took the names of my community members and totaled their purchases. I was able to prove that community members are active APQC product and services buyers. Then came the hammer. Would these people have made the same purchases were they not community members? Answer: Yes, possibly. This is the tough part. There is no way for me to tell how being in my community influences a purchase decision.

Next attempt was at membership tenure. Most of you know APQC is a membership based organization, so we live and die by our member retention rate. I looked at the list again and tried to determine how tenured these community members are. Same answer, community members are tenured APQC members. This time I put myself through the scrutiny; would these people have continued to be APQC members if your community did not exist. Same answer, I think so but I don't know for sure. I am not sure how being a member of my community impacts a decision for an individual to renew membership.

Back to the drawing board. I went back to my own advice. What was my community created for? It was created to add value to the membership. It wasn't created to increase revenue (although I wish I could say that it did). So I finally took this message to the management.

The KM community consists of tenured APQC members with purchasing power. I have several testimonials from community members that express this value sentiment. I cannot prove that my community makes them buy or makes them stay, but what I do want to try is to get them more involved and to expand the community offerings so that I can attract more members like these. Because my hypothesis is the more involved members I have the greater the probability of additional purchases and of membership renewal.

I did not ask for a lot of money. Just a little slush if I needed to travel to set up local chapters, a few technology dollars to incorporate this blog into the community site and an approval that I should continue to spend time on this community. (one of my proposals was to nix the community completely - my argument was if its all about the money then let's just not do it. But I know APQC, it's never just about the money, it's about member value, so I knew that was not going to happen:-))

I got all three. So I am going to spend the next couple months really setting strategies. Not just for my KM community but also for my Web site.

Now to the apology. I know I have been gone a while and some of you may have given up on me, but I was in way over my head trying to prove ROI (not just community, site and technology et al) and I had on request from Bill Ives gotten Amanda to conduct a blog review for me. It's pretty cool, she charges $100 and basically gives you some pointers on maximizing your blog.

That will definitely go in as part of my strategy for next year. Stay tuned for lots of changes and innovations from me. I'm crazy that way.