Eric Sauve is the CEO and cofounder of Tomoye and a serial entrepreneur. Tomoye is a relatively small company (he wont tell me the exact number and said less than 50) based on Canada with offices in Washington D.C.

“Communities of practice are distributed groups of people who share a
common concern, problem, mandate, or sense of purpose. The concept of
community binds them together.”

Tomoye develops software that enables internal communities of practice. The US Army for e.g. uses them to manage a professional forum of leaders the world over- “Company Command”. If you are of a certain rank and are faced with a certain challenge at work, who better to ask than someone “like you” or someone who has been through the same challenge before.

So how can communities of practice solve real world business challenges?
1. A large (mostly consumer) software company merged with another enterprise software company. After the acquisition they had 1200+ system engineers. Each with some special skill or expertise. Cost of sales was way too high and they could still not get enough technical resources (since each region had only one type of specialist). Collaboration & community knowledge was the only option since they had to cut resources by 20%. Community of practice of “Technical Sales engineers” allowed them to understand and share insights into particularly unique situations from their peers when they encountered this before.

2. A mid-sized life sciences company had to get support and R&D engineers together to solve critical problems for clients. The previous model was support would take the request first, try to resolve it with the old tiered approach (tier 1, tier 2, etc.) then escalate to R&D. Frustrated customers (who paid for support) complained and threatened to leave. The client decided to develop a community of customers and other partner experts who have most likely faced this scenario before and had them help with support request upfront. This also provided a forum for the “experts” in the ecosystem to shine in the limelight.