A Two-Front War: Maintaining a Community of Practice with Institutional Resources from Above and Member Support from Below

            Pete Kilner and Tony Burgess, the creators and co-directors of the U.S. Army’s junior officer Community of Practice (CoP), known as MilSpace, are working tirelessly to maintain their existence as knowledge brokers for the larger organization.  If they aren’t in Washington D.C. briefing key leaders or deployed globally connecting to young officers, you can usually find them working out of their office at the Center for Company-level Leaders (CCL) located at West Point, New York.   The two Ph.D.-holding Lieutenant Colonels are clearly passionate about their work.

            “My biggest validation is that when I went to Iraq as a resourcer, everyone said, ‘We love it, come on in, what can we do to help you?’  To say we’re with the CompanyCommand team just opens doors, because people know about what we have done for a huge group of junior officers, and they want to assist us in continuing to do so.”     

            In order to run the CCL, operate the MilSpace site, and fund initiatives, Kilner and Burgess rely on institutional support from West Point and the larger organization of the Army.  The creators of MilSpace recognized from the onset in 2000 that they would need tangible resources as well as social and political capital in order to succeed as a brick-and-mortar institution at West Point and a virtual CoP online.  By approaching key leaders in West Point’s academic community, primarily the Dean and the Vice Dean for Education, they enlisted early support for the concept as a tool for educating young leaders and advancing the profession.  At one point in their history, the CompanyCommand website was shut down by the Army’s Chief of Intelligence when an article by the Army’s Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL: a potential partial competitor in the market of providing knowledge resources to the organization) published an article indicating that the CompanyCommand site had posted secret material on its unsecure website.  Burgess and Kilner informed the Dean of the false accusation, and the Dean notified West Point’s Superintendent.  Based solely on trust of the statements made, the Superintendent said to reopen the sites.  The Superintendent (a three-star general) outranked the intelligence chief, and the site reopened. 

            Though military leaders have often called for metrics showing the benefit of MilSpace for the Army, the co-directors prefer not to expend time and money qualifying their existence.

            Kilner remarked, “We don’t invest the time to make a systematic capture of value added, but that’s a conscious decision that we’ll likely stick to as long as no one is making us.  We feel that if you’re doing that, you’re not designing content or adding value to the community.  The time we spend collecting stats is not time we’re making it more valuable for junior leaders.  Many organizations expend a lot of resources justifying their existence.” 

            Early in 2009, under the strain of pending budget and personnel cuts at West Point, Burgess sent an email to several MilSpace contributors, asking for their personal anecdotes related to the importance of the websites to their careers as junior officers.  The resulting product, called “The Reasons Why”, provided an easily-crafted yet effective tool for justifying the continued funding of the CCL. 

The MilSpace team has placed themselves in a position to act as brokers among various military and non-military organizations.  As an example, in 2008 Kilner was asked by the Army’s Chief Information Officer to spend three days in Boston conducting field tests on new software known as Cognitive Edge.  The new technology may be used to analyze the After Action Reviews (reports from military units detailing mission successes and failures) and more quickly change doctrine.  Kilner’s position within the military’s academic community allows him to move beyond the CCL and bring his assets to bear in multiple environments.  In so doing, he further expands the relevance and resources of his organization. 

            Though maintaining a constant flow or resources from above is of critical importance, Kilner and Burgess focus the bulk of their energy and effort on supporting the community they have helped establish.

            “It’s a constant battle for us, a constant tension, to be grass roots enough and part of the informal organization, while also having the resources, personnel slots, et cetera to stay up,” said Kilner. 

The MilSpace managers recognize the importance of developing trust between themselves and the junior officers they serve.  They build rapport with individual contributors by thanking them for sharing insights or being an active member of the VCoP.  Particularly dedicated members of the network may be asked to serve as topic leads and take on the responsibility of recruiting contacts, sending newsletters, conducting surveys, facilitating conversations, sending welcome letters, etc.  These are all means of continually reconnecting to community members.  In addition to fostering the growth of the network size and its knowledge generation, topic leads are well positioned within the network to direct resources to members in need of information. 

            Recent academic studies show that college students have a propensity to cite only information that is available online.  Current and rising generations of young officers are not only accustomed to conducting information search with computers, but they expect it.  The military leaders responsible for the support of MilSpace perhaps understood this when they latched onto the CompanyCommand model for creating and distributing knowledge.  The use of internet technologies to conduct search goes beyond the simple availability of conventional knowledge online, as demonstrated by the relatively low use of the Army’s Reimer Digital Library, a source of Army field manuals and training manuals.  Lieutenants and captains would rather access the information and advice of members in a CoP than attempt to meet their information needs in dense manuals. 

            Major Matthew Adamczyk, a recent infantry company commander in Iraq and current MilSpace member, remarked in an interview, “Not only am I more accustomed to searching online for information, but the MilSpace sites offered a great resource during multiple deployments to Iraq, where it’s not practical to carry a library of field manuals, even at the Battalion task force level.  I could usually get online even in the more remote operational areas.”

            Part of MilSpace’s success can be linked to its ability to categorize data in a meaningful way that enables users to search for accurate information quickly.  With some of the newer Web 2.0 technologies now incorporated into the site, members are shown potentially useful information without conducting a search, thus creating potential knowledge without user input. 

            “When I had a few minutes of down-time I’d often log into the site and just click around and see what was going on with other units or in other discussions.  The info I picked up doing this was invaluable, and was certainly time well spent,” Adamczyk said.

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