The Challenge of Managing Network Knowledge: Information Systems for Toursim Destinations

There is a growing attention towards Information Systems (ISs) aimed at managing inter-organizational knowledge and at enhancing competitiveness at the network level. But there are industries where network or district interdepend-encies are quite neglected in their management information systems consequences. Tourism is one of these cases; in particular, incoming activities, focusing on the tourism destination as a unit of competition, would deserve more attention on the part of IS scholars. This paper, based on a systematic literature search, analyzes the state-of-the-art of studies focusing on ISs for tourism destinations: it shows that most studies tend to concentrate on some popular topics (e.g. destination branding, or on-line booking) without exploring the important organizational underpinnings of destinations as networked, complex systems. Moreover, many writings focus on proposing innumerable new IS models and IT tools, whilst there is a dramatic lack of papers soundly studying, evaluating or testing existing IS/IT solutions for tourism destinations, both through qualitative and quantitative approaches. We classified the 142 papers identified in our literature search on the basis of three criteria: (1) main tourism business process studied by the paper (e.g. destina-tion planning); (2) main purpose of the paper (e.g. suggest policies for tourism de-velopment); (3) ICT solutions identified by the paper (e.g. GIS). We found that many potentialities of ISs for tourism destinations still wait to be unfolded by the scholarly community. The final outcome of this paper is a brief research agenda identifying the most promising among the several under-investigated topics in the field of ISs for tourism destinations.