Virtual Communities At Caterpillar Foster Knowledge Sharing

This article focuses on virtual communities at Caterpillar Foster Knowledge Sharing. A small, grassroots initiative at Caterpillar evolved into a successful, enterprise-wide process with projected savings of US$75 million. Caterpillar's Knowledge Network (KN) thrives with 3000 tightly focused communities of practice. The organization measures its KN success and achieves a 200 percent Return-on-Investment (ROI) for internal communities and more than 700 percent ROI for its external communities.