Demystifying the link between big data and knowledge management for organisational decision-making

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.