How mature is KM in your industry sector? An interesting plot

The plot below is based on data presented in this blog post from last May. 

The data come from our Knowledge management surveys in 2014 and 2017, responded to by over 700 knowledge managers world wide. in this survey we asked (among many other things) about KM maturity, in two ways: the maturity level of the KM initiative, and the number of years the organisation has been doing KM. These two variables are cross-plotted below, and each data point is the average for each of the industry sectors used in the survey. More explanation of the way the data were created can be found below. If you want a copy of the complete survey report, please fill in the form on this page

Cross plot of the average maturity vs the average duration of  KM initiatives within  number of industry sectors
Image copyright Knoco Ltd

More detail on the data

The plot is based on answers to three questions: 

1. A question "how long has your organisation been doing KM - please select the closest option" with the following options: 
   • 05 years
   • 1 year
   • 2 years
   • 4 years
   • 8 years
   • 16 years
   • 32 years
   • don't know
2. A question "how mature is your KM program", with the following answers;
• we do not intend to start KM
• we are investigating KM but have not started (0 points)
• we are in the early stages of introducing KM (1 point)
• we are well in progress with KM (2 points)
• KM is embedded in the way we work (3 points)
• we tried KM and have given up

The weighted average was based on the points score above. A sector which was fully mature in KM would therefore score 3 on the vertical axis, while a sector which was fully immature would score zero. Please note that the survey was answered by people with some interest in, or connection with, KM. Therefore this maturity is the maturity of the KM initiatives within the sector, rather than a measure of the take-up of KM within the sector as a whole. 

We also asked the respondents to identify which industry sector their organisation worked in. The list of sectors can be derived from the data labels. Any sector with fewer than 10 respondents has been omitted.

Conclusions

The graph shows those sectors which are more mature in KM terms, and have been doing it the longest. There is a reasonable straight-line relationship, as you might expect. The longer a sector has been doing KM, the more mature and embedded it becomes.

There are no fully mature sectors, and no fully immature sectors.

There is no flattening off at the top of the graph. There are no sectors which have been doing KM long enough that they have reached full maturity.