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Knowledge Sharing and Communities of Practice 149

Box 5.5
An example: Thomas & Betts (Gonsalves and Zaino 2001)

Networks, by defi nition, connect everyone to everyone. Hierarchies, by defi nition, do not;
they create formal channels of communication and authority. When a network becomes
the main means by which information is conveyed and work gets done in an organization,
our hierarchical crutches are knocked down. Rank is unclear. Networks operate informally
with few rules. They depend on trust. The fi rst dimension of trust is competence: I can
trust you if you are good at what you do. Second, trust needs a community. Networks
naturally spawn internal groups of like-minded individuals. When these emerge around a
common discipline, they are CoPs. CoPs create and validate competence. The boss may
not know who is the best at the job, but the community will always know.
At Thomas & Betts Corp., a $2.2 billion electrical parts maker in Memphis, Tennessee,
motivation is decidedly nontechnical. Board games in which teams compete on solving
business problems teach managers the importance of sharing ideas and information. “ It
gives employees a good sense of the roles and functions other people play in the company, ”
says Gary Bodam, director of training and development. Once they realize that their will-
ingness to share knowledge affects the bottom line in games, they ’ re more open to making
changes in how they operate in the real world, he says. But Thomas & Betts also is using
technology to foster knowledge sharing. The company runs an E-learning-management
system from ThoughtWare Technologies Inc. that tracks employees ’ continuing education,
such as public speaking or engineering. The data are logged in an SAP human-resources
system and can be used by managers looking for the best candidates for jobs. Says Bodam,
“ It ’ s all become part of the overall knowledge base by which we ’ ll try to move the orga-
nization forward. ”

memory for subsequent generations to learn from. What is critical to keep in mind is
that the context of each item of knowledge must also be captured: when it occurred,
who is knowledgeable about it, which one submitted it, and so on. Without this
context, the knowledge product is not complete and cannot be successfully used,
applied, or even understood.

Sociograms and Social Network Analysis

According to Krebs (2002), “ social network analysis is the mapping and measuring of
relationships and fl ows between people, groups, organizations, computers or other
information/knowledge processing entities. ” Social network analysis (SNA) can map
and measure relationships and fl ows between people, groups, organizations, comput-
ers, and other information/knowledge processing entities. The nodes in the network