collaboration

Communities of Practice [CoPs] are are viewed as an excellent way to discover, share and keep key knowledge in the organization -- especially critical tacit/informal knowledge that is hard to document and retrieve.

When management decides to implement CoPs they usually take an approach similar to drawing the organization chart -- they start slotting people into groups/communities where they "should be." This method is rarely successful because it ignores the many relationships, knowledge exchanges, and information flows that have already emerged around any capability, skill, interest, or process in an organization.