Factors Influencing Perceived Benefits and User Satisfaction in Knowledge Management Systems

With the ever-growing deluge of information, knowledge management systems (KMS) have become a key technology, enabling the extraction and filtering of valuable information by integrating seemingly unconnected or hidden pieces of information to create invaluable business insights. KMS may use sophisticated technical methods such as text analysis, search and querying, or facilitate state of the art Web 2.0 tools for sharing knowledge and collaborating. Research on the factors influencing user behavior and attitudes must regard modern KMS differently from IS. The reason for this is the great importance of the human factor in organizational knowledge management (KM): the user is not only a consumer of the system's output, as in information systems (IS), but also in many cases a producer of knowledge and an active participant in the system's functioning; global firms today are dependent mostly on e-communication; and KM is playing an ever-more important role in facilitating organizational competitiveness. Based on existing research in the area of effectiveness of IS and KMS, with modifications designed to include the special characteristics of KMS, this study offers a model for predicting user’s perceived benefits and user satisfaction, accepted factors of system success, in organizational KMS. Four constructs are theorized to influence the dependent variables: system quality, knowledge quality, user IS competence and organizational attitude to KM. In addition, a new measure for KMS quality is proposed.