The Impact of Big Data on Knowledge Management Systems in Romanian E-commerce Retailers Professor PhD Marta-Christina Suciu 1 , Professor PhD Andreas Kolodziejak 2 , Lecturer PhD Christian Năsulea 3 , PhD Candidate Diana-Florentina Năsulea 1 , Dipl. Engineer Eppe Jan Postma 4 1 The Bucharest University of Economic Studies, Bucharest, Romania 2 The European Union Commission, Brussels, Belgium 3 The University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania 4 Technical University of Eindhoven, Netherlands Abstract: Knowledge is one of the key strategic growth & development pillars facilitating the path towards a smart and sustainable competitive advantage. Theories within the field of knowledge management usually make the distinction between data and knowledge. However, over the recent years knowledge management has moved towards integrating diverse information with the purpose of generating valid decision-making processes. Big data is a relatively new concept that still raises many questions related to its relevance in knowledge management studies. Big data offers businesses the means to extract extensive information about their customers’ subjective preferences. However, making sense of the big data and transforming them into valuable knowledge that brings consistent and sustainable added value requires core human competences such as critical thinking. This process of analysing big data drives the conversion of business intelligence into knowledge that can therefore be useful in avoiding strategic risk and finding smart and effective business solutions. This main goal of the paper is to analyse the concept of big data in the theoretical framework of knowledge management and assess the implications of developing such a connection. We present the most important conceptual definitions and characteristics of big data and assess the possibility to integrate this concept within the traditional theoretical models of knowledge management. A secondary objective of our paper is to lay out the prerequisites of developing new knowledge management strategies according to the needs of the digital economy. Authors draw from the e-commerce experience in using big data for improving the decision-making process. We have collected data from a number of e-commerce SMEs that are acting on the Romanian online fashion retail market. An analysis of the impact of demographics and sales data on firms’ growth strategies was conducted. Simultaneously, our study looked at how business intelligence systems used by SMEs were applied in order to analyse the aforementioned data. Conclusions drawn from the study show the benefits and best practices in integrating big data into SMEs knowledge management strategies. The main focus is on identifying the best ways to improve net results through proper use of knowledge obtained from big data. Keywords: knowledge management systems; digital business; electronic commerce; big data; business intelligence. 1. Introduction With 386 million Google search results, big data is definitely one of the hot topics in academic research and practice of business management. In 2001, Doug Laney (Laney, 2009) issued the non-mainstream definition of big data through the 3Vs referring to volume, velocity and variety, highlighting the importance of data management in the process of transforming information into value. In 2017, the number of consumer and corporate emails sent and received per day reached 269 billion and was expected to grow at a rate of 4% every year (The Radicati Group, 2017). Organizations, companies and institutions are dealing with an increased number of data from platforms such as Google Analytics, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. However, having access to tons of statistics does not necessarily improve companies’ performances, because most of the data received tends to be of an unstructured type (Schneider, 2016). The digital economy is efficient in generating data but not always able to interpret and analyse it (Craney & Self, 2014). Leveraging unstructured data can represent a challenge for most organisations. However, technology offers the solutions to harness data and help companies gain a competitive advantage. Knowledge Management (KM) has the potential to integrate information from several sources in order to develop a better decision- making process. The basis of all existing approaches is knowledge acquisition (Craney & Self, 2014) or, more simply put, transforming information into knowledge. E-commerce companies are probably the biggest stakeholders when it comes to big data analytics (BDA), as structured demographics data and unstructured data referring to preferences are used as meaningful insights