KM your way to CMMI

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe two related fields – knowledge management (KM) and capability maturity model integrated (CMMI SM ) – and highlight their similarities. Design/methodology/approach – The KM framework used for this comparison is the one established and used at Israel Aircraft Industries, while the CMMI SM source of information is none but the original document produced by the CMMI SM product team at the Carnegie Mellon University, as well as papers published on the subject. Findings – Knowledge management is a rather young discipline promising to maximize innovation and competitive advantage to organizations that practice knowledge capture, documentation, retrieval and reuse, creation, transfer and share to its knowledge assets in a measurable way, integrated in its operational and business processes. The capability maturity model integrated deals with the ways an organization has to follow, in order to maintain well mapped processes, having well defined stages, because of the assumption that in mature organizations, it is possible to measure and relate between the quality of the process and the quality of the product. Though KM and CMMI SM take different approaches to the achievement of competitive advantage, they seem to be supporting as well as dependent of each other. Originality/value – Practitioners as well as researchers in the field of knowledge management and in the implementation of the CMMI SM standard will find comfort in realizing how mutually supportive are these two fields.