An International Meeting of the American Accounting Association American Accounting Association 2006 Annual Meeting August 6–9, 2006 Washington, D.C.

Vicky Arnold
University of Central Florida

Holli McCall
University of Connecticut

Steve G. Sutton
University of Central Florida

Abstract: Many firms have implemented knowledge management systems (KMS) to capture, store and disseminate knowledge across the firm. Concerns have been raised about the potential dependency of users on KMS and the related decrease in knowledge acquisition and expertise development. This study investigates how a KMS with declarative level knowledge impacts novice users. An experiment is conducted to study the performance and declarative knowledge acquisition of 189 participants partitioned into two groups—each group using either a KMS or traditional reference materials. The results show that KMS users outperform users of traditional materials when they have access to their respective systems/materials, but users of traditional materials outperform KMS users when respective systems/materials are removed. While all users improve interpretive problem solving and declarative encoding of definitions and rules, there are significant differences between the two groups.

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