Successful corporate communities: all communities are not the same

These are some of the questions that arose as my team began 9 months of research assessing Andersen Consulting's knowledge sharing initiatives. The team visited practitioners at client sites and offices around the globe to understand how the firm is currently sharing knowledge. A key aspect of the research was understanding how personnel used AC's Knowledge Xchange TM, a world-wide Lotus Notes system currently being used by more than 28,000 people. There are hundreds of knowledge databases created informally on a local level as well as formally on a global level, with most of them organized around communities. We knew before we began our research that some knowledge bases were more heavily used than others, but there was little understanding of why.