The greatest potential of e-commerce, though, lies in moving from a strictly market view of customer relationships to an approach that treats customers as members of a learning community organized around a related set of products and services. Communities of practice are valuable to learning organizations because they represent a completely new layer of organizational structure previously not addressed by traditional business units. Nevertheless, communities also present an unfamiliar challenge for managers. Nurturing healthy communities is more like tending a garden than building an engine they thrive on the personal energies and relationships of members. You depend on members passion for the topic that brings the community together.
Passion drives people to share and advance their collective knowledge.
You count on internal leaders and community organizers. Thought leaders develop new ideas and methods while organizers coordinate learning activities and initiatives in ways that satisfy both members needs and stakeholder demands. You must learn to leverage the strategic role of communities in the knowledge economy. In this economy, the knowledge capital that communities steward is your most critical strategic asset. They develop and coordinate key competencies and enable you to focus formal structures on customers and processes.