Constructing a Framework for the Association between Enterprises’ Knowledge Management Needs and Maturity

This research’s object is to discover the association between enterprises’ knowledge management needs and maturity. This research adopts the qualitative research – case study to deeply discuss enterprise’s situation for those imported knowledge management, to understand the goal, need, process and the maturity of knowledge management for enterprises, and eventually to construct a more efficient framework for analyzing the relationship between knowledge management need and maturity. This research has concerned about industry diversity, including government agency, service, engineering industry, medical industry, banking, and TV shopping industry, to make the research method be able to apply to every kind of industry, and every type of organization.
The research result shows that every enterprise’s definition and need for knowledge management are totally different, therefore the need for knowledge management varies among enterprises. On the premise of enterprise’s need, the weights of different aspects for discussing knowledge management needs are also different. This shows that there’s no general method to apply to every enterprises’ situation when we make discussion on the issue of knowledge management. About the knowledge management maturity, the levels of knowledge management maturity for most cases haven’t reached the highest level yet. It shows that we are not seeking for the highest level of knowledge management capability but for the fittest one. And it also shows that when the enterprise has knowledge management plan, we should take the enterprise’s need as major concern. The knowledge management maturity model can be used to analyze the enterprise’s knowledge management development level, and to find out if there’s anything should be improved or refined. But it might not be the only index. After analyzing the association between knowledge management need and maturity, capability in practice can’t have high association with needs for most cases. Based on Quality Function Deployment, we can see the association between practice capabilities and needs clearly. It provides enterprise to improve some capabilities that have high association with needs, to make up the others, and to fit all knowledge management needs. This research provides practical research comment and uses Quality Function Deployment to be the efficient way to measure the association between knowledge management needs and maturity