Assessment of communities of practice using network analysis

Effective and efficient knowledge creation, sharing and application are indispensable in nowadays globalised and knowledge-based economy. To maintain competitiveness especially knowledge-intensive organisations have to establish a working environment that supports the entire chain of knowledge processing. arsenal research, an applied research organisation, has therefore decided to support Communities of Practice to improve knowledge transfer and application. The communities mainly focus on the cultivation of a collaborative and innovative working environment that cross-links its multidisciplinary research staff. To allow for an objective evaluation of the communities and the achieved improvements social network analysis is applied. Main objective of this analysis is to identify the communication behaviour and knowledge transfer especially across the different business units. As a reference for the evaluation process a network analysis has been performed at the beginning of the communities' development phase. Network analysis has emerged as a set of methods for the analysis of (social) structures by focusing on investigation of the relational aspects of these structures. Network analysis combined with visualisation is a very useful tool for supporting the analysis. Few core indicators of social Network Analysis have been applied for calculating the community networks. A directed graph of a one node network visualized via PAJEK has been applied. Different aspects of the communication and collaboration behaviour have of the scientists at the starting phase of the communities. The results clearly indicate what has also been experienced in the development process - a lack of communication and cross-linking between the different organisational units. The paper gives an overview over the applied method for network analysis, a discussion of the results in the context of the experiences made in the first phase of the communities as well as an outlook regarding the further steps.