Knowledge management provides your organization with actionable information and opportunities to win in the marketplace by building more knowledge value into your products and services. Knowledge ecology adds the context, synergy and trust necessary to effectively use information, recognize dangers and opportunities, and turn them into knowledge and successful action. Managers who try to pressure employees to create and share knowledge, soon realize that they are facing an up-hill battle. It acknowledges and celebrates the power of informal communities of peers, their creativity and resourcefulness in solving problems, and inventing better, easier ways to meet their commitments. A community of practice is a group of people who are informally bound to one another by exposure to a common class of problem.
Communities of practice are peers in the execution of 'real work'.
What holds them together is a common sense of purpose and a real need to know what each other knows. If your organization's flexibility of response to the marketplace is a function of an open culture of collaboration, then growing a culture of communities of practice, supportive to sharing innovative work practices is an economic necessity. For the first time, we now find ourselves at a point where the confluence of technological opportunity, moral responsibility, and economic necessity demand that we create such a world. They frequently exchange notes and solve problems in the virtual environment of the company's intranet. That's the economic foundation which has been giving rise, in the last couple of years, to knowledge ecology.