Tentative propositions for integrative knowledge management systems design model

The practice of knowledge management (KM) has become ubiquitous across organisations, driven by the realization of importance of knowledge and learning for competitive advantage. To date, research has provided little guidance as to when knowledge management systems (KMS) will be successful in enabling organisations to leverage knowledge. To the best of researcher knowledge, the current literature has not yet provided guidelines on how to analyze a particular environment (e.g. business process), understand the possible KMS-functionalities, and choose the ones that are appropriate for the business context under question. In this thesis, a possible model for design of knowledge management systems is proposed as an answer to the question of "How do knowledge needs influence the design of KMS for supporting and enabling knowledge creation and utilization? " The basic proposition of this research is that KMS need to fit user needs and that these user needs will differ across different organisational contexts. In order for KMS to provide value, KMS-design process needs to account for these differences and suggest what kind of technology meets these needs. The KMS design model constructed in this research tells how to analyze knowledge needs of employees, and how the nature of knowledge needs influences the design of a KMS that enables and supports knowledge creation and utilization in everyday working practices. Based on thorough scrutiny, synthesis and combination of existing literature from fields of IS, KM, and management/organisational science, a KMS design model is built in a manner of IS design-science type of research. Taking steps in appropriately grounding the research in existing theories (i.e. Evolutionary information processing theory (Li and Kettinger, 2006)) and task-technology fit concept (Goodhue, 1995, Zigurs and Buckland, 1998)) ensures indispensable rigor. The proposed model can act as a starting ground for design theory of KMS that support knowledge utilization and knowledge creation, if verified in future research