The development and application of a community maturity model

Abstract

Knowledge is considered as a strategic resource in the current economic age. Strategies, practices and tools for enhancing knowledge sharing and knowledge management KM in general became one important issue for knowledge-intensive organisations. Despite the demonstrated role of communities in sharing, capturing and creating knowledge, the literature is still missing standards 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 organisations to manage knowledge. This paper proposes a new community maturity model CoMM that was developed during a series of focus group meetings with professional KM experts. This CoMM assesses members' participation and collaboration and the KM capacity of any community. The practitioners were involved in all stages of the maturity model's development in order to maximise the resulting model's relevance and 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. This paper reports on the development and application of the initial version of CoMM and the associated method to apply it.