Community of Practice and Organizational Design

In this paper, we pointed out how the form and management of an organization shapes its levels of knowledge transfer and learning. We document the lessons from an ongoing knowledge management program within a major French banking company at its early beginnings. Basically, the purpose of this program is to understand how knowledge sharing and learning can be supported in professionallyoriented communities to reduce business process and improve organizational performance. Through this business case, we illustrated that promoting management initiatives without taking into account organizational structures is a nonsense. Corporate success in today’s economy comes from being able to acquire, codify, and transfer knowledge more effectively within the whole organization. From this point of view, organizational design is about enabling a group of people to combine, coordinate, and control resources and activities in order to produce value i.e. organizational knowledge. Too many knowledge initiatives undertaken today are disconnected from organizational design. As a result, many executives are unsure of how to translate the goal of becoming a “learning organization” into strategic course of action. Thus, creating the appropriate organizational design can enhance the organization ability to create and exploit knowledge