Getting better at Knowledge Management: Integrating individual skills and organisational capability.

This paper arises from a work in progress academia/industry collaborative research project to develop a Knowledge Management (KM) maturity model as a component (critical capability) of the IT Capability Maturity Framework (IT-CMF). KM is understood as an organisational capability i.e. the effective mobilising of the resources of people, processes and technology to support the achievement of an organisation’s objectives. The research questions addressed are as follows: what are the challenges for organizations in developing an effective KM capability?; what are the respective roles of individual skills and organisational capability in developing a KM capability?; how can individual skills and organizational KM capability be integrated to help organisations get better at doing KM? The key finding is that an important challenge for KM in terms of developing capability is the potential for processes and technology to both enable and block how well people manage knowledge. The role of learning is important and the link between individual learnings and organisational capability is key, but challenging to manage. Initial data indicates that combining a skills-based approach with an organisational capability approach might be a helpful practice for organisations and some suggestions are provided on how to synthesise this challenging field into tools and guidelines that practitioners can use.

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