A method for identifying the critical success factors of CoP based on performance evaluation

The Community of Practice (CoP) within an organization is a practical way to manage knowledge as systematically as other critical assets to deploy and share it. The availability of the right information at the right time based on performance evaluations is critical. However, there have been few attempts to identify Critical Success Factor (CSFs) based on evaluations to foster knowledge sharing activities in CoPs. Therefore, we developed not only a holistic and systematic method to understand and assess the current state of the CoP but also a method to extract the main CSFs of the CoP based on a performance evaluation. A method for the elementary expression of performance measures and the global performance expression of strategies and CSF was developed using a desirability function to provide information useful in grasping the whole picture of the CoP. The relative importance of strategy and CSFs was extracted based on the cause and effect relationships within the Balanced Scorecard using the Analytic Network Process. In addition, an Importance–Performance Analysis (IPA) is applied based on the relative importance and global performance expression of the CSFs.