Leading companies are responding by creating
“distributed knowledge communities,”
which use digital tools and intentional management practices
to foster voluntary knowledge exchange and collaborative problem-solving.
For supply chains (SC), critical expertise has always been scattered across locations, organizations, and time zones, creating invisible barriers to effective problem-solving and innovation. However, the COVID-19 pandemic added to that fragmentation by spurring an unprecedented shift to hybrid and remote work environments.
While the pandemic is behind us, this transformation remains.
To account for these changes, we must adapt our knowledge management practices for organizing, storing, sharing, and using knowledge to support geographically disparate individuals across the supply chain.
We need to learn how to leverage and proactively manage knowledge throughout our organizations and supply chains while creating synergies between people who may never meet in person.
But how do we do that?
The answer is
creating “distributed knowledge communities” (DKCs)—
connect, collaborate, and solve problems.
A knowledge community (KC) is a group of individuals within a work environment who
have a common objective and are required to share knowledge collaboratively.
1 A subset of these communities are “distributed,” meaning they work in geographically dispersed locations and experience additional challenges and barriers, such as different languages, customs, cultures, and work hours.
Distributed knowledge communities are intentionally organized
to overcome these challenges,
with members by leveraging varied work models to exchange knowledge throughout the extended network.
2 DKCs foster active and voluntary knowledge sharing and contribution through digital tools.
Traditionally, knowledge management (KM) approaches have included digital systems that
create centralized knowledge hubs,
establish formal processes for capturing explicit and tacit knowledge, and
build knowledge bases or repositories.
3 These approaches also define roles and leadership for KM and integrate KM into employee onboarding and professional development programs.
The goal is to preserve and disseminate institutional knowledge, allowing the organization to learn through collective experiences and to improve decision-making.
Unlike traditional KM approaches, which focus on sharing static, potentially stagnant, and/or asynchronous information, DKCs create dynamic networks where expertise flows freely across organizational boundaries throughout the extended SC.
The point is not to rely on a static approach where the knowledge is organized and stored in disparate systems but to create a community that values and prioritizes synchronous knowledge sharing. This horizontal and vertical real-time SC knowledge exchange allows for the proactive management of problems that are constantly evolving and increasing in complexity.
Our research with SC professionals reveals that SC networks that embrace the concepts of DKCs minimize SC complexity and gain significant advantages:
faster problem resolution,
enhanced innovation, and
more resilient operations.
By fostering environments where information needs are actively fulfilled through voluntary knowledge contribution, these organizations are breaking down silos and building bridges instead.
Distributed knowledge communities
SC professionals have long recognized that knowledge sharing is fundamental to collaboration.
Today’s new hybrid work environment, however, has made knowledge sharing more complex.
lines of communication have increased exponentially;
traditional knowledge-sharing approaches often fall short, resulting in delays or stale information.
