A Framework for Understanding the Complementary Roles of Information Systems and Knowledge Management Systems

Knowledge is nowadays an essential resource for modern organizations to support sustainable competitive advantage. Many authors point out that as knowledge is created, disseminated, and applied, it contributes to value creation within organizations by enhancing their capabilities to respond to pressures from the external environment. To acknowledge the critical role of knowledge in modern organizations, knowledge management has emerged as a scientific discipline. However, the dominant view of knowledge management is technology-oriented and considers this activity primarily as an integrated approach to identifying, retrieving, capturing, storing and sharing organization's information assets. This mechanistic and technology-oriented view of knowledge management is the main cause of the failure of many knowledge management systems built within modern organizations. It is thought that the well-established technology oriented knowledge management approach has to be improved in order to facilitate building effective knowledge management systems which help modern organizations in their search of continuous and sustainable competitive advantage. This paper proposes a framework - based on the Popper's three worlds' theory - which helps understand the complementary roles of information systems and knowledge management systems.