Knowledge Management Maturity Models
There are divergent schools of thought on the desirability of KM maturity models. Several groups, including APQC, have published multi-level models which have been widely shared and used. Others are wary of such models, e.g., Nick Milton, who warns they are inappropriate and dangerous. Jim Lee (at APQC at the time) and Nick Milton of Knoco (which offers a free KM maturity survey) each presented their views during a professional services KM group call.
My own view is that it can be helpful to identify your organization’s current and desired states for a knowledge management program. But I recommend using frameworks, models, and benchmarking as sources of ideas, not as precise prescriptions to be slavishly followed.
It’s better to understand your organization’s specific challenges and opportunities, and map a course tailored to those specific needs. Understanding other KM initiatives is helpful, but don’t try to replicate them exactly. Instead, borrow, reuse, and adapt the ideas that best fit.
If you choose to assess your KM initiative using one of these models, don’t worry too much if the result shows a low level of maturity. If your efforts result in tangible benefits, keep doing what you’re doing, and look for additional areas of impact to pursue. And don’t pat yourself on the back too hard if the model reveals that you are at a high level. Take such a result with a large grain of salt. Focus instead on how you can continue to improve.
Insights
1. Patrick Lambe in the actKM Discussion List
Just a couple of thoughts on the limitations of maturity models — when the organisational landscape is heterogeneous, a maturity model tends to gloss over/average out significant differences in portions of the landscape, removing them from visibility and opportunity for action. It also tends to ignore unique but salient factors of the environment being assessed.
Also, when used as a guiding mechanism promoting idealised frameworks, it tends to start getting gamed. If at all, maturity models are much better used as part of a diagnostic/planning mechanism along with a lot of independently gathered data and in focused, homogeneous contexts. There’s a blog post here.
Now it may be your context is sufficiently focused in both domain and community scope for my concerns to be dismissed. But it will sit within a bigger context, so a health warning is always in order.
I do think by the way there’s a bit of confusion here between a KM framework and a maturity model. A framework is essentially two dimensional until it gets a strategy to give it meaning and direction (conversely a strategy needs a framework to give it actualisation). The strategy forces the framework to “get real”.
A maturity model postulates somewhat idealised statements about lifecycle stages and their indicators, and I find it can actually exist quite independently of reality on the ground. I’ve seen maturity descriptors that look fine on the report card while the organisation actually flounders in practice. A typical indicator is “senior management appreciate the significance of a knowledge-based approach and support KM”. I’ve seen KM initiatives that do well without senior management noticing or bothering, and I’ve seen KM initiatives that failed because KM was given too much support (everything new was labelled KM and loaded on the KM team until they died of exhaustion).
2. Nicole Forsgren: Secrets and Surprises of High Performance: What the Data Says
Maturity Models don’t work
Maturity models are for CHUMPS
Maturity models tell us we are done once we reach a certain destination… and then the world passes us by
Maturity models tell us (and leaders) to stop dedicating resources once we have arrived
Maturity models tell us we all follow the same path to success
Maturity models tell us technology is a checklist to be completed and not an exciting journey to continually explore and improve
3. Here’s what’s wrong with maturity models by Christiaan Verwijs
What maturity models assume
Growth is a linear progression through a number of discrete phases, each marked by unique characteristics.
Growth looks the same across organisations, teams, and individuals. The context may affect the path, but it doesn’t affect the phases, what characterizes them or in what order they occur.
What is on the right of the maturity is generally assumed to be ‘good’, whereas the left is assumed to be ‘bad’. This makes maturity models highly normative.
Growth is not linear and it doesn’t happen in discrete phases marked by convenient external characteristics. Reality is far messier than your maturity model.
Why are we using words in a professional context that reference children and childlike behaviors? Employees are not children. We don’t need to encourage organisational parenting — there’s plenty of that already.
The same goes for the use of words like “Level” in these models. How are we making people feel if we consider their growth as a game where they have to “Level” up? How do we feel about people that are ranked above or below our “Level” in this organisation?
Models are intended to simplify reality. Maturity models are the best friend of consultants. They are easy to understand and may seem very profound at first. But just like with snack food, what looks appealing at first glance and seems to hit the spot when you consume it, doesn’t actually offer anything of substance on closer inspection. And it’s bad for you.
4. David Williams in the actKM Discussion List
A comparison of available KM Maturity Models (see below) indicates that the models generally reflect a subject matter approach to assessing the capability of an organisation to manage its intellectual capital. Note, not all of these are KM Maturity Models, but were included for interest
All of the models below appear to gloss over the process aspect. Organisations manage knowledge to better achieve their goals and are less concerned about where the activities fit in and more concerned about what outcomes or return on investment is achieved. The author argues that verbs should be used instead of subjects/nouns to describe KM processes within organisations because they better describe the actions that increases the value obtained from their intellectual capital and are independent of any structure.
Comparison of Various KM Maturity Models
Example from Deloitte
Resources
1. Stan Garfield
2. APQC
3. Uday Kulkarni, Robert St. Louis Organizational Self Assessment of Knowledge Management Maturity
4. British Columbia Auditor General Self-assessment guide
5. Chris Collison, Geoff Parcell
6. Cory Banks KM Maturity Models
7. David Griffiths
8. David Skyrme KM Maturity
9. Howie Cohen KM Strategy: Does Maturity Matter?
10. K. Suresh, Kavi Mahesh Ten Steps to Maturity in Knowledge Management: Lessons in Economy
11. P. Kochikar The Knowledge Management Maturity Model: A Staged Framework for Leveraging Knowledge
12. K. Kuriakose, Baldev Raj, S.A.V. Satya Murty, P. Swaminathan Knowledge Management Maturity Models — A Morphological Analysis
13. Radziah Yusof KM Maturity Model — What’s Your Organization’s Maturity Level?
14. Nick Milton
15. Knowledge Compass KMmm ® Model
16. Knowledge Management Bible KM Maturity Model
17. LibSource Don’t define KM strategy without assessing KM maturity
18. Michel Grundstein Assessing Enterprise’s Knowledge Management
19. G. Pee and A. Kankanhalli A Model of Organizational Knowledge Management Maturity based on People, Process, and Technology
20. Patrick Murphy Knowledge Management Maturity Models and Phased Measurement
21. Maya Kaner, Reuven Karni A Capability Maturity Model for Knowledge-Based Decision making
22. Ron Weerdmeester, Chiara Pocaterra, Mark Hefke Knowledge Management Maturity Model
23. Siemens AG
Manfred Langen Holistic Development of KM with the KM Maturity Model: KMMM®
Manfred Langen and Karsten Ehms KMMM® — Knowledge Management Maturity Model: The forum for holistic Analysis and Development of Knowledge Management
25. Straits Knowledge
Patrick Lambe Why We Treat KM Maturity Models With Caution
Patrick Lambe Developing a KM Maturity Assessment that Supports Action Planning
26. Tata Consultancy Services (TCS)
Peter-Anthony Glick TCS KM maturity model and implementation methodology
27. Ontology-Based
Mark Hefke, Frank Kleiner, Andreas Storkenmaier, Oliver Paulzen Retaining Knowledge Management Maturity Models: An Ontology-based Approach
Mark Hefke, Frank Kleiner An ontology-based software infrastructure for retaining theoretical Knowledge Management Maturity Models
28. US Army Developing an Enterprise KM Competency Model
29. NASA Knowledge Maturity Model
30. WisdomSource K3M: The Knowledge Management Maturity Model
31. J. Kruger, M.M.M. Snyman Formulation of a strategic knowledge management maturity model
32. John Coles Knowledge-Flow Maturity
33. Michael Bolton Maturity Models Have It Backwards
34. KK Kuriakose
Knowledge Management Maturity Model: An Engineering Approach
Knowledge Management Maturity Models–A Morphological Analysis
35. Graham Durant-Law Does Knowledge Management Need A Maturity Model?
36. Bill Kaplan
37. The Community Roundtable Community Maturity Model
38. IKMS KRO (Knowledge Ready Organization)
39. Harold Jarche The self-governance maturity model
40. Bruce Boyes What does the research say about knowledge management maturity models?
41. ISO 30401 Standard for Knowledge Management Systems
Director, Knowledge Management Consultant at Knoco Australia
6yUsing the Knoco Knowledge Management Maturity Model as a starting point for conversations has proven exceptionally helpful to clients. Having multiple people do the survey and comparing results is also a good starter. This is all in line with Arthur's comments. In terms of Geoff Elliott's query on the weightings - they are all equal in our model because you have to get them ALL right to some degree.
CEO & co-founder at Gioda Consulting | Business Engineer | Innovation Manager | Associate Partner at YourDigital
7yI agree, thank you for having shared the resources, a good input! I have proposed a similar approach for the digital transformation. I believe it is good for many strategy related challenges.
I take people on the journey and get change happening. Designing, facilitating and managing sustainable change ; coaching to uplift change capability and adaptability in the organisation.
7yHaving just gone through the APQC benchmarking process I can thoroughly recommend it. It is definitely NOT a prescription - it does not actually provide prescriptive actions or a "recipe for success". It's a thought provoking framework which can be used on many levels to stimulate thinking and target areas for improvement. We have used it in our team to learn about what makes a "complete" KM offering - and then we've discussed what we need to do to meet our own business knowledge strategy - what's relevant to us, not the APQC or any other organisation. It's also been useful to highlight the different facets of KM to leadership. Again, not in a prescriptive way. The team at APQC go to some lengths to make all of this clear. We'll continue to use this and many other tools and techniques to create our own formula for success.
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7ySo, are all the dimensions of the above model equally weighted and it so, by whom? noting all the actors and payers in a system will have a different persepctive