A Community Maturity Model : an application for assessing knowledge sharing in the field

Abstract

Knowledge is considered as a strategic resource in the current economic age. Strategies, practices and tools for enhancing Knowledge Management (KM) became one important issue for organizations. Despite the demonstrated role of communities in sharing, capturing and creating knowledge, the literature is still missing instruments for assessing their maturity. Even if several knowledge-oriented maturity models are provided at the enterprise level, few are focusing on communities as a mechanism for organizations to manage knowledge. This paper proposes a new Community Maturity Model (CoMM) that was developed through a Design Science perspective to assess members’ participation and collaboration and the KM capacity of a community; and to identify its needs, to ensure its development and sustainability according to its mission, degree of formalization, developmental stages, means, etc. This CoMM is intended to be sufficiently generic to be applied to any type of communities and useable by practitioners for conducting self-assessments. KM experts were involved in all stages of the maturity model’s development in order to maximize the resulting model’s relevance and practical applicability. The model was piloted and subsequently applied within a Chief Knowledge Officers (CKO) professional association, as a community, to assess especially knowledge sharing among its members. The present work tries to respond to the research question on how to determine community evaluation basing on a KM perspective. This paper reports on the first field application and evaluation of the initial version of the CoMM.

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