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Enhancing knowledge exchange through
Communities of Practice at the Inter-
American Development Bank
1
Alfredo Moreno
Internet Studies Research Group, Department of Information Science, City University, Northampton
Square, London, EC1V OHB
MorenoA@is.city.ac.uk
A relatively new and spontaneous organisational form, simply referred to as Bank Net-
works or Communities of Practice (CoPs) (informal groups of professional workers who
share similar interests and goals), have emerged in the past few years at the Inter-Amer-
ican Development Bank (IDB). They are complementing the existing structures and
enhancing knowledge exchange and organisational learning.These Bank Networks posi-
tion the Institution in an optimal situation to explore to a greater extent the bene¢ts of
knowledge exchange and leveraging of institutional knowledge. The article examines,
evaluates and gives the main ¢ndings of an empirical study of the nature, structure and
activities carried out by the existing Bank’s Communities of Practice. Some ideas as to
whether organisations should be supporting and encouraging the formation and devel-
opment of Communities of Practice, and whether and how their proliferation should be
fostered, are o¡ered for consideration.
Introduction
There is a growing acknowledgement that the
operational success of any organisation or
institution will increasingly rely on their ability
to leverage institutional knowledge. Based on
this premise, it seems there is movement from
the principle that the truly signi¢cant knowl-
edge that an organisation possesses is tacit
2
(knowledge in people’s heads).The rationalisa-
tion behind this is that tacit knowledge essen-
tially remains with the individual rather than
being accessible to an organisation at large.
Building up on this theory, the ‘organisational
collective knowledge’ idea has been cultivated
and rooted within the new ‘Communities of
Practice’
3
school of thought.
This school of thought formed by
researchers and practitioners drawn from
anthropology, social development, manage-
ment, and information systems and computer
science, proposes that knowledge is gener-
ated not just tacitly, but collectively (Kleiner,
2000). The results of these studies, as well as
current organisations’ knowledge manage-
ment strategies, suggest that the most critical
know-how in any given company is not stored
in its computer system or the ‘institution’s rule
book or manual’, but in its casual conversa-
tions (Kleiner, 2000), self-organised group
interactions, and also individual relationships
(Lesser and Prusak,1999).
For the last decade or so, Communities of
Practice as an organisational concept have
received much attention from many institu-
tions, organisations, governments and devel-
opment agencies. These Communities of
Practice are seen as a mechanism for knowl-
1
This article represents the personal views of the
author, and not necessarily those of the Organisational
Management Services O⁄ce (ITS/OMS) or the IDB. It
complements the Knowledge Exchange & Networks Re-
port prepared by the author under the guidance of
Jean-Pierre Be
¤
guin andJulio Estrada, at the time Co-co-
ordinators of the Knowledge Exchange Network Steer-
ing Committee (KENSTEER) at the IDB.
2
Described in the theory of organisational knowl-
edge creation (Nonaka andTakeuchi,1995).
3
This term was ¢rst coined by Lave and Wenger
(19 91).
Aslib Proceedings Vol 53, No. 8, September 2001 ^ 296