Investigation of knowledge management maturity and benchmarking practices in Chinese enterprises

Knowledge Management (KM) has become widely employed as a new but promising management tool for optimizing business management and operations in China. In order for enterprises to develop a mature KM process capable of demonstrable benefits, they must assess their adoption of KM with regard to certain benchmarking practices. This paper, using a systematic approach, attempts to design and build a novel KM maturity (KMM) evaluation mechanism that combines and adapts existing models developed in the context of western management practices with new features from China´s unique culture and social background. First, the key criteria are extracted via empirical analysis of the results of an extensive questionnaire, completed and returned by hundreds of Chinese enterprises in 2012. Next, based on a quantitative assessment of KMM, we further analyze the KM benchmarking practices in China. Finally, we demonstrate that KM practice in China is in a transitional stage from a content-oriented approach to a community-practice- oriented and employee-growth-oriented approach; we also observe that the Chinese enterprises with better management practices and more advanced information technology infrastructure are experimenting with integrated application-oriented KM approaches that can better foster technology and management innovations in enterprises.