Utilization of knowledge management in improving information technology investment return: A qualitative study

The challenge of exploring new ways to evaluating the return on information technology (IT) investments has opened a new era of conducting research opportunities where information asymmetry (IA) was examined. Effort was made to explore the effectiveness of knowledge management systems (KMS) to maximize the rate of investments (ROI) for IT deliverables. The study focused on the investigation of the key research question, how can the use of KMS as an integral part of IT strategic management improve benefits and return such as ROI? While prior research identified several areas addressing the role of KMS, there was little evidence of the integration of tacit and explicit knowledge types of KM for exploring the effectiveness of KMS to improve ROI. This study employed a qualitative research method to identify relevant IT deliverables and KMS actions to evaluate the possible outcome by integrating tacit and explicit knowledge. The study considered five KMS effectiveness factors: information quality, service quality, user involvement, user motivation, and user satisfaction. An iterative process of qualitative analysis was utilized through a coding mechanism to capture the events in a textual form of data analysis. A qualitative text and content analysis was used to categorize the IT deliverables and their relationship with KMS effectiveness factors and KMS actions. The results of data collection and the analyses revealed a strong link between KMS effectiveness factors and the outcomes of IT investments. To minimize the potential biases, information was collected from multiple sources of secondary data. The textual data checklists revealed that successful implementation of KMS effectiveness could overcome the problem of adverse selection and moral hazard. In the field of information economics, minimizing the problems of adverse selection and moral hazard had been the focus of discussion for the last 40 years. This study has contributed the results from integration of tacit and explicit knowledge for KMS effectiveness that minimizes the problem of IA in maximizing the investment return for IT organizations. The limitations of qualitative research and the scope of future research in both qualitative and quantitative were illustrated and discussed in this paper as well.