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 organisations 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 organisational KM capability be integrated to help organisations get better at doing KM? The key finding is that a pivotal challenge for KM in terms of developing capability is the potential for processes and technology to both enable and block effective KM through people. The role of learning is important and the link between individual learning and organisational capability is key, but challenging to manage. Initial data suggest 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 these approaches into tools and guidelines that practitioners can use.