THE ADOPTION PATTERNS OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS IN SMES OF SOFTWARE INDUSTRY: AN IN-DEPTH STUDY TO INVESTIGATE THE DRIVERS AND INHIBITORS

Abstract

Organizational knowledge resides in the processes, products, services, people, culture, documents, and systems of an organization. Organizational knowledge management consists of identification, acquisition, development, storage, transfer, utilization, and evaluation of knowledge within and outside the organization. Effective organizational knowledge management not only enhances the performance of the organization but also help to get competitive advantage. Enterprise systems are enterprise application software to support organizational processes, knowledge management, reporting, data analytics, etc. Knowledge management systems (KMS), in particular, are a type of enterprise systems used by organizations to organize and manage organizational knowledge. These systems support the implementation of knowledge management within an organization and help organizations to generate new knowledge while recording, utilizing, and allocating existing knowledge. The potential for adopting KMS is an essential element in SMEs, especially in developing countries. Large Organizations are widely accepting these systems while there is still a scarcity of understanding of the factors behind the non-adoption of KMS by SMEs. The software industry is a complex, knowledge-extensive, and experimental industry and can get immense benefits from knowledge management systems. Therefore, the interest of this research is to examine the adoption patterns of SMEs belong to the software industry to adopt the knowledge management systems. The research model of this study is based on the concept of UTAUT2 (Extended Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology) and investigating its constructs to examine the adoption patterns of KMS. This study examines the impact of Performance Expectancy, Effort Expectancy, Social Influence, Price value on the Behavioral Intention of user to use the KMS and how Facilitating Conditions and Behavioral Intention to use KMS influence the Use Behavior of a user to adopt KMS. This is an explanatory study and descriptive in nature. The quantitative approach is used and an online survey was conducted among 383 respondents. Total 280 responses were analyzed by using SPSS. This sample was adequate as using Power and Precision software a minimum sample of 230 was computed. To understand the effect of the understudy constructs we ran pearson correlation and regression tests. The outcome of this research show that Social Influence has a significant influence on the employee’s behavioral intention to adopt KMS while performance expectancy and price value has strong and effort expectancy has a weak but positive impact on the behavioral intention of the employee to use KMS. The results also show that facilitating conditions and behavioral intention are the components that strongly explained the use behavior of a user to use KMS.