The Complementary Roles of Information Systems and Knowledge Management Systems: A Framework Based on Popper’s Three Worlds Theory

Knowledge is increasingly playing a key role in achieving organizational success in modern organizations notably in leveraging core business competencies, accelerating innovation and time to market, improving cycle times and decision making, strengthening organizational commitment, and building sustainable competitive advantage. To acknowledge the critical role of knowledge in modern organizations, knowledge management has emerged as a scientific discipline. Nevertheless, the dominant view of knowledge management is overly tidy since it considers that knowledge management is technology oriented and sees it primarily as an integrated approach to identifying, retrieving, capturing, storing and sharing organization’s information assets. This mechanistic and input-oriented view of knowledge management is the main cause of the failure of many knowledge management systems built within modern organizations. We think that the well-known input-oriented and mechanistic 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. The needed improvements require firstly, the identification of the differences between information systems and knowledge management systems and secondly, the description of their roles within modern organizations. In this paper, we propose a framework, based on the Popper’s three worlds theory, which explains the complementary roles of information systems and knowledge management systems.