Can Technology Build Organizational Social Capital: The Case of a Global IT Consulting Firm

Knowledge Management (KM) and Knowledge Management Systems (KMS) have been positioned as strategies and tools that enable organizations to create and transfer knowledge in order to sustain competitive advantage. While Knowledge Management as a strategy was able to gain legitimacy, KMS struggled to prove a causal relationship to knowledge creation and knowledge transfer. KMS contribution to the economic performance of organizations has been harder to prove mainly because of a lack in the collection and analysis of knowledge metrics. This has lead to unjustifiable move within the KM community to underplay the role of technology especially in the case of knowledge creation and transfer. In this paper, we attempt to revive interest in KMS by exploring KMS ability to accumulate social capital and its effect on the creation and transfer of knowledge. We pose social capital as the mediating factor between KMS and knowledge creation and transfer and theorize that (1) KMS will positively affect an organization’s ability to build up social capital, and that (2) social capital will enhance a firm’s ability to create and transfer knowledge. Qualitative data collected from a multinational IT consulting firm, that have successfully implemented a KMS as the main channel for developers to create and transfer knowledge, is used to validate the framework.