Role of Knowledge Management Systems within the expertise transfer

This paper reviews three cases of information seeking environment within Brazilian KIBS (knowledge intensive based services) companies aiming to present how experts (or people with greater expertise) use or fail to use information technology to generate metaknowledge (or knowledge about knowledge). We are concerned about the differences between the perspective of information seeking from an expert in regard to a novice, but by considering other intermediate degrees of capability as well. In general, access to information is performed by using Knowledge Management Systems in order to searching within the organizational database, however, even the "information" remains stored into a datawarehouse, the metaknowledge produced from this interaction belongs only to the user. So if the user has enough expertise, the use of any information system comes to be obsolete. Thus, through the observation of the expert\´s behavior, we suggest and test a model for diminish that problem. Results demonstrate that the efficiency in the use of a computer system depends largely on the requirements of experts and their relationships with the people involved in developing such systems. Even, our model remains as a theoretical approach it suggest a basis for a software engineering to develop a customized Knowledge Management Systems for underpin the research problem.