The Role of Tacit Organisational Knowledge in IT- enabled Organisational Change

In this paper we present the findings of an exploratory investigation that revealed the existence of organisational tacit knowledge within the minds of professional system analysts. Our research was motivated by the concern that outsourcing may lead to diminished organisational knowledge – that organisations outsourcing their total Information Systems (IS) operations may also have lost irreplaceable tacit, cross functional knowledge. We present a model which will support an examination of whether total IS outsourcing will normally lead to loss of organisational memory and to subsequent research into a knowledge management-based response to that problem.