Make Your KM Mmm-Mmm Good!

As my loyal readers (both of them – thanks Mom and Dad) have undoubtedly noticed, much of my recent discourse has focused on how to get knowledge management – something, anything – up and running.  But what about the long haul?  How do you build something that is going to have legs, something that’s more than just a sidebar to your everyday business routines?

The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind – from Pittsburgh, PA.  Pittsburgh is the home to the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), a federally funded research and development center at Carnegie Mellon University.  Among other things, the SEI is home to the software Capability Maturity Models® (CMMs®).  CMMs “…assist organizations in maturing their people, process and technology assets to improve long-term business performance.”  The SEI has developed CMMs for software development, people and acquisition. 

A CMM guides an organization in establishing and improving core business capabilities, typically through five evolutionary stages or “maturity levels” that lay successive foundations for continuous process improvement.  These maturity levels “…define an ordinal scale for measuring the maturity of an organization’s [XYZ] process and evaluating …