بررسی عوامل موثر بر سیستم مدیریت دانش (KMS) در شرکت های کوچک و متوسط SME ها Examining the factors influencing knowledge management system (KMS) adoption in small and medium enterprises SMEs

1. Introduction Knowledge management (KM) is crucial for organizations’ competitiveness and success (Witherspoon et al., 2013). KM makes organizations incorporate resources and capabilities in a distinctive creative way (Chen and Lin, 2009). Organizational competitiveness is derived mainly from intangible rather than tangible resources. Knowledge is considered to be an intangible resource that is possessed by organizations (Hwang et al., 2008). The growing awareness that knowledge is the most valuable asset to any organization has encouraged organizations to pay a great deal of attention to how to manage these assets appropriately. Organizations that obtain the maximum benefit from their KMS adoption recognize that, most KMS adoptions involve not just technology but business change as well (Tarafdar and Vaidya, 2006). The success of KMSs, just like other information systems (IS), depends on several factors (Quaddus and Xu, 2005, Butler et al., 2009). Thus, firms must prepare themselves appropriately for the successful adoption of KMSs to facilitate achieving the benefits of skills utilization that is to be gained from KM activities. It is also critically important to confront issues, challenges, and opportunities posed by these activities effectively (Nevo and Chan, 2007). KMSs have emerged in a variety of patterns in many disciplines. Indeed, there is no one framework for KMSs. KMS is a type of IS that supports and enhances KM processes related to creation, storage, retrieval, diffusion and application of knowledge within and outside an organization (Alavi and Leidner, 2001, Quaddus and Xu, 2005). KMSs have shown their usefulness in various sectors and industries, for example, the public sector (Jain and Jeppe Jeppesen, 2013), non-governmental organizations (Corfield et al., 2013), small-to medium-sized enterprises (Durst and Runar Edvardsson, 2012), the banking industry (Oluikpe, 2012), life insurance businesses (Huang et al., 2011), human service and professional services firms (Palte et al., 2012), and manufacturing organizations (Birasnav and Rangnekar, 2010). Although KM has been studied widely over the past few years in different industries, there is not much literature on KMS adoption (Quaddus and Xu, 2005, 2007). These studies mainly focus on the issues of knowledge processing (Hahn and Wang, 2009), KMS design principles (Richardson et al., 2006), KMS architecture (Pirró et al., 2010), IS success model (Kulkarni et al., 2006), KMS performance evaluation (Mccall et al., 2008), IT applications (Hjelmervik and Wang, 2007) and critical success factors (CSFs) of KMS implementation (Nevo and Chan, 2007). Many researchers have noted that KM has been found capable of improving productivity and competitiveness (Wei et al., 2009), effective acquisition, sharing and usage of information with organizations (Chong and Lin, 2009), decision making (Chou et al., 2008), and organizational performance (Chong et al., 2010). Although KMSs are being used by organizations to leverage knowledge as a resource and to support their KM activities (Kankanhalli et al., 2005, Lee and Choi, 2003), KMS adoption initiatives have failed (Butler, 2003). The failure of KMSs mostly refers to the fact that many organizations concentrate only on IT (Hsu et al., 2007). While KMS is complex and cannot be treated only as technology, cultural and organizational dimensions must also be considered in order for KMSs to be effective (Alavi and Leidner, 1999). other studies have found little improvement in organizational performance and argue that regardless of significant investment in KM (Bogner and Bansal, 2007, Lee et al., 2005), many organizations are still struggling with its implementation. Therefore, understanding how to successfully adopt a KMS remains a high priority, especially since management has made large efforts to take KMS initiatives (Kuo and Lee, 2011).