Description
For years, organizations have used cross-functional virtual communities to help employees share knowledge, connect with experts, and collaborate to solve business problems. However, as technology and work norms evolve, teams must decide how to adapt their communities to take advantage of collaborative ideation tools, social networking, smart phones, cloud-based computing, and other developments.
In this webinar, APQC Principal Research Lead Lauren Trees will share recent research on the evolution of cross-functional communities. Using findings from APQC’s 2017 Next-Generation Communities of Practice study and the 2016 IRI/APQC Virtual Roundtables, she will address the following questions:
- What is the current strategic role of cross-functional communities of practice?
- What roles and responsibilities are crucial to virtual communities, and what factors drive effective leadership?
- What tools and approaches support communities today, and how has new technology affected community interactions and knowledge sharing?
- What innovative methods are being used to encourage engagement in virtual communities?
- What are the newest techniques to measure community health and value?
Contributors
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Lauren Trees, Principal Research Lead, APQC
Lauren Trees identifies trends in enterprise knowledge sharing and collaboration, researches cutting-edge ways to improve knowledge flow, and shares the findings with APQC’s members and the knowledge management community at large.
Lauren is a regular contributor to APQC’s Knowledge Management blog and organizes monthly webinars on these topics for APQC members and subscribers. She has served as research lead for two large-scale APQC Best Practices Studies—Transferring and Applying Critical Knowledge and Connecting People to Content—and has led additional research on developing and leveraging technical experts, expertise location solutions, enterprise content management, gamification, and KM maturity and measurement. Her most recent focus is research on the future of KM, technical mentoring initiatives, what’s next for communities of practice, and knowledge mapping in action.
A prolific and proficient author of numerous reports, white papers, and case studies, Lauren has written about KM for media outlets including KMWorld, Industry Week, and Pharmaceutical Engineering, and her research has been cited by Inc. and TIME. She is an experienced speaker, having presented at the Petroleum Abstracts and KMWorld conferences as well as numerous corporate meetings and webinars.
Lauren holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Brown University, where she graduated magna cum laude and won prizes in literature and music. She has studied at the University of Oxford and Rice University, where she undertook Ph.D. studies in Victorian literature. Prior to joining APQC in 2007, Lauren worked as a developmental editor for Prentice Hall, specializing in computer science textbooks by first-time authors, and coauthored a textbook on web services with Harvey and Paul Deitel.