Demystifying the Link between Big Data and Knowledge Management for Organisational Decision-Making

Abstract

Over the past three decades, the knowledge management (KM) discipline has evolved within the broad field of business administration. To an extent, the KM discipline has matured by offering a diverse range of perspectives, processes, models and strategies linked to decision-making in organisations. Since 2010, due to burgeoning developments in technology and innovation, there is a steep growth in big data and business analytics (BA) methods, techniques and tools to enable and support decision-making in organisations. Due to the ongoing developments in datafication, there is little understanding how big data and KM are linked in the context of organisational decision-making. The aim of this chapter is to demystify this link by focusing on the human dimension of KM and its connection to big data hence the research question: What is the bridging link between big data and KM in the context of organisational decision-making? We propose a conceptual model and five arguments that illustrate the role of ‘contextual knowledge experts’ as a link between big data and KM for organisational decision-making. The conceptual model sets the basis to extend the ideas in this chapter for future quantitative and qualitative research on this topic.