Role of the tacit information within knowledge management systems

Within the knowledge management arena, two forms of knowledge have been considered, in the aim of implanting systems and align them with the available resources: explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge. In this sense, resources based on information technology have demonstrated a good alignment and have been a great help for storing explicit knowledge and, in some cases, for recovery it. However, when it comes to storing, distributing or sharing tacit knowledge, the same systems offer significant limitations. This paper aims to present the characteristics of tacit knowledge, which may be contained into information systems in order to seek an alignment with the technology and the way in which this knowledge could be understood at machine level, or, if it is possible, store it and then share it. The experiment consists of a case study based on the observation of researchers seeking to write academic papers and their alignment with the support information systems that they use. The results indicate that the tacit knowledge, as seen from the Knowledge Management arena, has differences from tacit information, which can be stored at the information systems level.