Understanding Factors Influencing the Creation of Personal Applications in Knowledge Management

Knowledge management is increasingly getting ‘on-demand’ and ‘just-in-time’. One sign of this paradigm change is the ever increasing emergence of applications that are created by the users themselves to support their personal needs. Despite their opportunities, these applications pose several risks on corporate knowledge management, e.g., the transgression of organisational policies or the profusion of work time. For that reason it is important for corporate knowledge management to understand these self-initiatives. This paper presents the results of a structuring content analysis in end-user development literature whose objective was the investigation of factors influencing the creation of applications by end-users. It presents a typology of factors and discusses their relations and implications

Understanding maturity models: Results of a structured content analysis

Abstract: Maturity models are popular instruments used, e.g., to rate capabilities of maturing elements and select appropriate actions to take the elements to a higher level of maturity. Their application areas are wide spread and range from cognitive science to business applications and engineering. Although there are many maturity models reported in scientific and non-scientific literature, the act of how to develop a maturity model is for the most part unexplored. Many maturity models simply -and vaguely -build on their, often well-known, predecessors without critical discourse about how appropriate the assumptions are that form the basis of these models. This research sheds some light on the construction of maturity models by analysing 16 representative maturity models with the help of a structured content analysis. The results are transformed into a set of questions which can be used for the (re-)creation of maturity models and are answered with the help of the case example of a knowledge maturity model. Furthermore, a definition of the term maturity model is developed from the study's results. Keywords: capability, maturity model, knowledge maturing, structured content analysis Categories: H.1.0, H.3.1, M.9 1 Maturity modelling and knowledge maturing Maturing has been used as an analytic, explanatory or normative concept in several domains, the most well-known of which is software engineering, e.g., Nolan's stage theory As a deeper understanding of maturing and maturity models is necessary for the creation of a new or revised maturity model, goals of this paper are to give an overview of the different conceptions of maturing and fundamental principles of maturity models and show the applicability of the results with the help of the case Proceedings of I-KNOW '09 and I-SEMANTICS '09 2-4 September 2009, Graz, Austria 51 example of a knowledge maturity model. The paper presents the results of an in-depth analysis of 16 maturity models for their individual characteristics in order to gain information about the nature of maturing and maturity modelling. The results are then used to inform future development of maturity models in the domains of (business) information systems and computer science with a special emphasis on the field of knowledge management, i.e. knowledge maturing. Aspects of how these findings could be used to inform the creation of new or the revision of existing maturity models are discussed with the help of the example of a knowledge maturity model. Section 2 gives an overview of the procedure taken for the analysis of maturity models. Section 3 presents and discusses the results of the structured content analysis of 16 maturity models. Beyond that, section 4 proposes a definition for the term maturity model, before section 5 concludes this paper. A study design for the analysis of maturity models The investigation into the nature of maturity and the act of maturity modelling was performed with the help of the structured content analysis method. This section presents the applied study design for the investigation of 16 maturity models. Analysis in the scientific world is often distinguished into qualitative and quantitative approaches. Quantitative research strategies are based on the model of the natural sciences and therefore facilitate the testing of hypotheses. Qualitative research strategies are based on the model of the social sciences and follow an inductive approach of research. This approach could also be described as an understanding approach which is often used to build hypotheses. [Schambach-Hardtke 2005, 18]. The aim of the current research is to explore and analyze existing models and to investigate characteristics and not to test hypotheses which would require a prior investigation. This procedure of identifying characteristics demands a qualitative approach. We decided to rely on textual descriptions of maturity models as sources for our investigation rather than empirical evidence in order to be able to cover more models and compare them. A suitable method focusing on the analysis of contents and the identification of criteria is the structured content analysis [Mayring 2008, 82pp]; its general procedure is depicted in In the next step, information associated with an analysis item is extracted from the model context and put into another structure determined by several structuring dimensions (2) and its underlying category system (3). In this paper, the structure was determined by the analysis question "Which characteristic patterns can be observed by comparing maturity models?" that comprises four sub-questions: -What does the term maturing mean? Aim is to find the underlying concept of maturing employed by the model. -Which element is maturing? Aim is to classify the subject of maturing into person, object or social system and some more detailed categories. -What are the main features of a maturity model? Aim is to find a construction plan for maturity models. Because the authors were not aware of any similar studies, no codes were available, hence an inductive approach was needed to develop these. M. Kohlegger, R. Maier, S. Thalmann: Understanding ... 53 -How is the model used and supported? Aims to answer the question why some maturity models are applied in practice while others are not. For example for The material was worked through in three phases [see The classification into these three categories is in line with knowledge as maturing element that can either be connected to a person, an object or a social system [Maier 2007, 198pp]. In order to equally imply all knowledge media into the M. Kohlegger, R. Maier, S. Thalmann: Understanding ... 54 content analysis, identical numbers of models were drawn from each subset. The sample based on this trisection finally contained 16 1 models