Supporting Communities of Practice in Public Administrations: Factors Influencing Adoption and Readiness

Abstract

Exchange of experiences is a common means of informal learning in work places. Multiple organizations have discovered the benefits of actively supporting a community of practice to support this. We implemented a community of practice platform in two public administration organizations concerned with employment and experienced differences between the cases as well as difficulties during the implementation. After conducting a systematic analysis, we identified several influencing factors affecting the emergence of a community of practice. We propose a set of readiness indicators derived from this analysis, offering researchers and practitioners a tool to estimate the readiness of a public administration organization towards adopting communities of practice.