A Community Maturity Model : a field application for supporting new strategy building
Résumé
Nowadays, we assist in an exponential growth of online communities and social networks. The community-based knowledge management (KM) approach has become one of the most effective instruments in KM. Despite the demonstrated role of communities in sharing, organizing 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 organizations 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, collaboration and decision-making, and the KM capacity of any community. The model was piloted and subsequently applied in the field. This paper reports on the CoMM application within an Alumni association of a French university in order to support the building of its new strategy.