The development and application of a community maturity model

Imed Boughzala and Ikram Bououd

International Journal of Information Technology and Management, 2013, vol. 12, issue 3/4, 273-297

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.

Keywords: knowledge communities; communities of practice; maturity models; community maturity; knowledge management; KM capacity; knowledge sharing; knowledge capital; information capital; design science; performance; innovation; modelling; knowledge-intensive organisations; member participation; collaboration. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.inderscience.com/link.php?id=54801 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ids:ijitma:v:12:y:2013:i:3/4:p:273-297

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in International Journal of Information Technology and Management from Inderscience Enterprises Ltd
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sarah Parker ().