The Influence of Digital Technologies on Knowledge Management in Engineering: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Digital technologies are gaining widespread acceptance in engineering and offer opportunities for collating and curating knowledge during and beyond the life cycle of engineering products. Knowledge is central to strategy and operations in most engineering organizations and digital technologies have been employed in attempts to improve current knowledge management practices. A systematic literature review was undertaken to address the question: how do digital technologies influence knowledge management in the engineering sector? Twenty-seven primary studies were identified from 3097 papers on these topics within the engineering literature published between 2010 and 2022. Four knowledge management processes supported by digital technologies were recognized: knowledge creation, storage and retrieval, sharing and application. In supporting knowledge management, digital technologies were found to have been acting in five roles: repositories, transactive memory systems, communication spaces, boundary objects and non-human actors. However, the ability of digital technologies to perform these roles simultaneously had not been considered and similarly knowledge management had not been addressed as a holistic process. Hence, it was concluded that a holistic approach to knowledge management combined with the deployment of digital technologies in multiple roles simultaneously would likely yield significant competitive advantage and organizational value for organizations in the engineering sector.