Communities of Practice as Knowledge Management Tool June 2014 Communities of Practice as a Knowledge Management Tool: De-Graft Johnson Dei. ivydei@yahoo.com. June 2014 1 COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE AS KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT TOOL Dei-Graft Johnson Dei KAAF University College, P.O. Box WU177, Kasoa, Ghana Email: ivydei@yahoo.com Abstract Knowledge sharing have become essential requirements for every organization. Knowledge management has emerged as an overarching strategy to enhance knowledge creation, information transfer, utilization, and reticulation in order to generate innovation and improve organizational performance. Part of this strategy involves the creation of Communities of Practice. These are networks of individuals with a common, shared purpose grouped together to facilitate knowledge building, idea creation and information exchange. Key terms Knowledge Management, Communities, and Communities of Practice (CoP) Knowledge Management According to Davenport et al. (1998), knowledge management is concerned with the exploitation and development of the knowledge assets of an organization with a view to furthering the organization’s objectives. The knowledge to be managed includes both explicit, documented knowledge and tacit, subjective knowledge. Management entails all of those processes associated with the identification, sharing and creation of knowledge. This requires systems for the creation and maintenance of knowledge repositories, and to cultivate and facilitate the sharing of knowledge and organizational learning. Thus knowledge management is to achieve four major objectives which includes: 1. To create knowledge repositories, which store both knowledge and information, often in documentary form. These repositories can fall into three categories: 1. Those which include external knowledge, such as competitive intelligence.