Monday 12 January 2015

How mature is your industry sector in KM terms?

How mature is Knowledge Management as an applied discipline, and how does this vary with industry sector? (We have already seen how it varies by geography).

This was one of the areas we explored with our global Knowledge Management survey this year. 
Maturity was measured in two ways - an estimate of the number of years that KM had been a focus, and a verbal description of maturity of KM within the organisation, with 5 descriptors

  • We are investigating KM but not yet started
  • We are in the early stages of introducing KM
  • We are well in progress with KM
  • KM is embedded in the way we work
  • We have tried KM and given up


The diagram on the right above shows the results for the verbal assessment.
Not all industry sectors are shown on this diagram, as for some the number of data points was too small to be significant.

We can see that Knowledge Management is most mature in Construction and Engineering, Professional Services, Oil and Gas, and the Military.  The percentage of organisations that have given up on KM clusters netier at the not nor the bottom of the picture, and seems unrelated to maturity.

The second diagram on the right shows the average number of years that the respondents from each sector said their organisation had been doing KM.

Generally the organisations that were rated as more mature in KM terms are also those who have been doing KM the longest, such as Oil and Gas, Military, and Professional Services.

The most noteworthy outlier is Legal Services - the sector with the longest history in KM, but in position 6 (out of 13) in terms of described maturity level.  Also Construction and Engineering, which was rated the most mature, but is 5th in the "average number of years" list. 

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