Knowledge management: another management fad?

By

Leonard J. Ponzi

Doctoral Candidate, College of Information and Computer Science, Long Island University, New York, USA

Michael Koenig

Professor & Dean, Palmer School of Library and Information Science, Long Island University, New York, USA

The two authors Misters Ponzi and Koenig main objective is to analyze knowledge management if its another management fad in an analytical framework using bibliometric techniques where article retrieved from Science Citation Index, Social Science Citation Index, and ABI Inform referring to three previous recognized management fad.

A management fad can be considered an innovative concept or technique that is promoted as the forefront of management progress and then diffuses very rapidly among early adopters eager to gain a competitive advantage.

Examples of management fad:

Quality Circles

Total Quality Management

Business Process Reengineering

The authors presented empirical evidence that management fads generally, peak in approximately five years.  See comparing Figures 2, 3, and 4, each management fashion peaked from four to six years after some momentum had started. ( see full version:   http://InformationR.net/ir/8-1/paper145.html )

The case of knowledge management

To a large extent, knowledge management is being considered by many as an emerging multidisciplinary field associated with the likes of system engineering, organizational learning, and decision support, to mention a few. Skeptics, on the other hand, are claiming that knowledge management is just another fad like Total Quality Management or Business Process Reengineering. The article-counting technique is applied to the concept of knowledge management in order to illuminate its current state of development.

Using the same approach employed in the earlier cases, article counts were retrieved from the three DIALOG files i.e., Science Citation Index (File 34), Social Science Citation Index (File 7), and ABI Inform (File 15). The retrieved counts were articles that included the phrase 'knowledge management' in its title, abstract, or descriptor fields. The assumption made is that retrieved records that included 'knowledge management' in these fields represent writings focused on knowledge management.

See Figure 5, suggest that knowledge management has weathered the five-year mark and perhaps is becoming an addition to the management practice. The diagram illustrates that the popularity of Knowledge Management expanded rapidly from 1997 through 1999, contracted in 2000, and then rebounded in 2001. To explore the growth period of the knowledge management lifecycle further, an additional bibliometric technique was used to reveal of Interdisciplinary Activity. Interdisciplinary activity indicates the exportation and integration of theories or methods to other disciplines (Pierce, 1999; Klein, 1996), in our case, to the development of the emerging field of knowledge management. The method ranks journal names of knowledge management source articles from above and then assigns an ISI's Subject Category Code. ISI's codes have been operationalized by ISI and have been assumed as indicators of disciplines (White, 1996). This study assumed a threshold count of three or greater. In other words, three or more sources articles in ISI-assigned journals needed to occur in order to be included in the analysis. This threshold reduces the number of random occurrences in journals and indicates the concentration of publication activity

In conclusion, when applying this general rule of thumb to the popular concept of knowledge management, it appears that knowledge management has initially survived.  It is certainly plausible to hypothesize that if knowledge management does indeed mature into a permanent new component of managerial attention, it will continue to grow and in the process undergo a tweaking phenomenon -- that is, morphing or transforming into clearer, easier understood concept