The relative maturity of KM in various industries

One of the interesting results from our 2014 and 2017 surveys of KM was to compare KM maturity against different industries.

Our Knowledge management surveys in 2014 and 2017, responded to by over 700 knowledge managers world wide, asked (among many other things) about KM maturity, in two ways:

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
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
- 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 tried KM and have given up

We also asked the respondents to identify which industry sector their organisation worked in.

Cross plotting these results allowed us to measure the relative maturity of different industry sectors.

1) Length of time.

The average length of time identified by respondents in different industry sectors is shown in the Table below. This suggests that the Legal, Construction, Oil and Gas, Consulting and Military sectors have the longest KM history, with Education and Public Health at the bottom of the list.

Organisation type	Average years KM experience
Legal Services	9.0
Construction and Engineering	8.2
Oil and Gas	7.8
Professional, Scientific and Technical Services	7.7
Public sector – military and emergency	7.5
Non-profit – aid and development	7.1
Public sector – government admin	6.3
Public sector – other	6.2
Administrative and Support Services	6.1
Electricity, Gas Supply, Water and Waste Services	6.1
Manufacturing	5.7
Financial and Insurance Services	5.5
Information Media and Telecommunications	5.3
Transport, Postal and Warehousing	5.3
Other Services	5.2
Non-profit-other	4.9
Public sector – health	4.7
Education and Training	3.8

2) Maturity levels

The percentage of responses identifying different maturity levels for the different sectors is shown in the chart below (for example, on the top bar, about 6% of respondents from the legal sector said their organisation was “investigating” KM, 24% said they were “in the early stages” and so on). The industry sectors are shown below in order of maturity. The number of responses for each sector varies from 12 to 110, as any sectors with 10 responses or fewer was not included in the graph.

Again, Legal, Oil and Gas, Construction and Consulting (Professional Services) are at the top in terms of maturity, joined by the Non-Profits. Education and Training is still at the bottom of the list.

Conclusion

The results of the table and the graph above can give us some idea of the relative maturity of KM in various industry sectors.

Those sectors who have been doing KM the longest, and who are most mature in KM terms, include

The legal sector
Oil and Gas
Construction and Engineering
Professional services firms
The Military
Some of the non-profits (who have not been doing it for long, but who seem to have matured quickly).

Those sectors who have been doing KM for the shortest time, and who are least mature in KM terms, include

Education and Training
Manufacturing
Other services
Financial and Insurance

If you want a copy of the complete survey report, please fill in the form on this page

View Original Source (nickmilton.com) Here.

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