knexsis provides enterprise solutions and services for corporations engaged in developing communities of practice within their own organization and across their business networks.

What is a Community of Practice (CoP)?

A group of professionals, informally bound to one another through exposure to a common class of problems, common pursuit of solutions, and thereby themselves embodying a store of knowledge. "It is a group of people who interact , learn together, build relationships, and in the process develop a sense of belonging and mutual commitment" (E. Wenger - 2002). 

Why is it important?

A Community of Practice is the place where people share valuable knowledge and best practices, and learn from one another. Multiple CoPs can give companies a powerful competitive edge: They break down silos and create corporate citizenship without creating new structures. As such, they are central to any successful change management initiative, and to effective corporate communication on the intranet. Because people seek social groups or classes of like-minded people, community membership results in loyalty, knowledge-sharing, and bonding. The ROI of CoPs is usually in the hundreds of percentage points.

Web-enabled Virtual Community Management (VCM) software now provide communities of practice with a new array of communication tools particularly suited to their communication needs. They complement in a very powerful way traditional face to face meetings, conferences, seminars and even video-conferences. This is why web-enabled CoPs, are the most powerful way to align different organizations in a common culture

The Business Problem

Companies understand that web-based tools, whether Internet, Intranet or Extranet, can put communities of practice to work in the B2B arena. But many projects fail to meet expectations. The reasons are threefold:

- First, building a community is a difficult endeavor, and very few companies understand what it takes to build a CoP. They very often consider technology and "knowledge bases" as the solution. 

- Second, the social dynamics of communities of practice have been overlooked and separated from  the business processes of the organization. 

-Third, until recently, the  technology that makes it possible for companies to design online community networks of peers across organizations was costly and by and large ineffective . 

The proven approach is to design communities for the web using appropriate tools, and apply methods and approaches such that actual communities of practice (people and relationships) can emerge form those.

The knexsis offering

Products: Knexsis developed Virtual Community Management (VCM) components based on the aforementioned principles. The VCM architecture of knexsis, dubbed Kn-Net™, was developed to serve the needs of on-line expertise services of communities of practice for B2B applications. It addresses the complex problem of capturing valuable and sensitive knowledge, profiling and cataloguing that knowledge, transferring the knowledge to those who need it, and storing the knowledge for future reuse, in the business context of cross-company business communities and multiple access rights.

Services