Knowledge Management Research of Famous Gurus and main Theoreticians.

1. WHAT ARE THE MOST INFLUENTIAL THEORETICIANS
IN KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
FROM THE PRACTIONERS’ PERSPECTIVE?
Alexildo Velozo Vaz
Reference Center for Business Intelligence (CREATE)
COPPE/UFRJ
Block I 2000 room (I-014c - subsoil - Technology Center of the UFRJ
Island from Fund€o - Rio de Janeiro - 21945-970
alexildo@gmail.com
Vasily Ryzhonkov
IMIM, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Politecnico di Milano
vryzhonkov@gmail.com
ABSTRACT
Theory and practice are always together in knowledge management. The professionals who work
in this field of study are not restrained to the practice of the characteristic processes used by
knowledge management; they search in new studies and theories elements able to help them in
the improvement of such processes. This article intends to identify who is the most influential
theorist in knowledge management, and which is his or her most impressive contribution from the
point of view of knowledge management practitioners. The results were acquired through discussion
groups in communities of practice in LinkedIn site by knowledge management practitioners. The
information provided by community members was validated by its comparison to H Index, which
regards the amount of quotations received by an article from 1996 to 2011, for scientific articles listed
in Scopus database, from each of the theorists mentioned by the practitioners. To sum up, 23
practitioners mentioned 38 scientists and theorists. The conclusion is that the perception of
community members is correct for the two scientists with highest H-Index: Davenport and Nonaka.
Keywords: knowledge management, theorists, Scopus, LinkedIn, H-Index
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2. 1. INTRODUCTION
Knowledge Management is a young field of study and application. Although the concept of knowledge
has been studied for a long time - taxonomies, for example, set out the concerns of Aristotle (2010) - its
application and the processes involved, what concerns the organizations improvement and personnel,
dating from a few decades. From the seminal works of Polanyi (1966) on tacit knowledge, an immense
set of knowledge was formed about how the knowledge can be created, identified, classified,
disseminated, reused, improved and integrated to the organizational culture and business world in order
to create competitive advantage and make them more productive.
During this period also came a new kind of professional, dedicated to study, analyze and improve such
processes within organizations. These professionals are called Knowledge Management Practitioners
(KM Practitioners). In spite of not having at present certifications for this profession, majority still
consists of professionals from diverse backgrounds (administrators, economists, engineers, archivists)
forged by practice and application the concepts that comprise the Knowledge Management.
The presence of this professional's type became more frequent as the world economy started to have
more “workers of the knowledge” (in English, knowledge workers), i.e. workers in the service sectors
of economy than the workforce in other sectors (industry and agriculture). That happened in the mid-
seventies, which reinforce the exponential growth of That happened in the mid-seventies, which
reinforced the exponential growth of the available knowledge. From that time the studies on the impact
of this event in business world started to multiply. Drucker (1980) was the first one to use the term
“knowledge worker”, Senge (1990), Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995), Davenport and Prusak (1998) and
many others, have produced works that helped to establish what is known nowadays as Knowledge
Management.
2. OBJECTIVE
The main objective of this study is to identify the most influential theoreticians in Knowledge
Management from the standpoint of those who practice this discipline in the business world, through
social evaluation (rating). The secondary objective is to compare and validate the perception of KM
practitioners with a more conventional method of measuring the influence and relevance of the
scholars' works, the H index. The third and final objective is to verify the quality and reliability of the
opinions expressed in a social network. The main contribution of each one of the passed theoreticians
does not make part of the aim of this work. Nevertheless, the contributions outlined in the Annex B.
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3. 3. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
This study is based on two basic concepts – definition of what is the area of Knowledge
Management, necessity to define a theoretical area; and what is the index H - and the assumption
that assessments (ratings) prepared by users are better and more accurate than rankings made by
other methods (O'DELL and HUBERT, 2011).
3.1 Management of the Knowledge (KM)
The term Knowledge Management (KM) appeared initially as an academic discipline in
Nonaka’s work in 1991. According to Davenport and Prusak (1998), the KM is a set of processes that
controls the creation, dissemination and use of the knowledge to reach fully the objectives of the
organization (DAVENPORT and PRUSAK, 1998).
Griffiths (2011) makes the concept is more complete when he affirms that KM coordinates
the organizational environment to develop value-based solutions that enable acquisition, storage, use,
sharing and creating knowledge assets of organization, which can later be strategically and
tactically applied to achieve the innovation needs of the organization, capability of change, and to
facilitate decision making within the physical and virtual environments.
In this work we consider KM as a systematic effort to assist the flow of knowledge and information to
the right people at the right time so they can act more efficiently and effectively in order to find,
understand, share and use knowledge with the purpose of creation add value (O'Dell
and HUBERT, 2011).
There is also the taxonomy, that is, the classification scheme used to categorize sets information
on KM. Taxonomies of KM were used to verify that the cited author can even be considered an
expert on the subject, was further verified in Scopus of the author's work on the area.
3.2 Index H
The H index (also called the Hirsch index) is intended to measure both the productivity and impact of
the published work of scientists and academics. The index works as follows: a scientist has
index h if h of his/her Np papers have at least h citations each, and the other (Np − h) papers have no
more than h citations each. (Hirsch, 2005). In other words, a scholar with an index of h has
published h papers each of which has been cited in other papers at least h times. For example, a
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4. scientist H index is equal to 3 if at least each of three his articles cited in other 3 papers. The h-index is
intended to measure simultaneously the quality and quantity of scientific output.
The index works properly only for comparing scientists working in the same field; citation conventions
differ widely among different fields. The h-index grows as citations accumulate and thus it depends on
the 'academic age' of a researcher. It is also important to mention the h-index can be manually
determined using citation databases or using automatic tools. Subscription-based databases such
as Scopus and the Web of Knowledge provide automated calculators.
The literature makes a series of criticisms of this index, for instance: the h-index does not account for
the number of co-authors of a paper. In this work in particular, offers an additional disadvantage since
the source used, the Scopus database – considered the largest base of abstracts and citations of the
world, containing 44 million records (SCOPUS, 2011) - began to calculate the H index from 1996
onwards, i.e. in a period subsequent to the publication of works by some of
the authors cited. However, it is a universally accepted indicator and available.
4. METHODOLOGY
This was a semi-qualitative and empirical work based on the collection and analysis of the opinions of
23 practitioners of Knowledge Management who would, in the opinion of these people, the most
influential KM theoretician and why.
The question "Who is, in his opinion, the most important theorist of Knowledge Management and what
is his/her greatest contribution?" which was posted in English in April 2011 in the Community of KM
Practitioners hosted on the website LinkedIn, a social network of professionals, received through June
2011 23 answers.
In the preparation of this work, all the answers were taken into account, including those who were
bringing names of more than a theoretician. It was not informed that the answers might, in some
moment, be an object of a study. The opinion of the author was not taken into account in this analysis;
it did not make part of the sample either.
To perform the analysis, we created a table with the names of all the theorists cited and the number of
mentions received by each of them, including those who are not in the area of Knowledge
Management. The negative citations were dismissed.
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5. Then a search was made in the Scopus database system to identify H index of each author, the
quantities of documents in the base, citations and co-authors included in the Scopus database for the
preparation of another chart. This step was intended to corroborate, or not, the results obtained by the
free consultation with KM professionals.
Finally, the results obtained in the discussion group were compared with those of Scopus. The last step
before the analysis was the calculation of the coefficient of simple linear correlation between the
number of votes received by each scholar and its index H. By correlation here we mean the degree of
relationship between two variables, in this case, the H index and the count of votes received by each
theorist. The formula of the correlation is:
Where r is the correlation coefficient, Cov is covariance and S is the standard deviation of data sets x
and y (WANNACOTT and WANNACOTT, 1978).
5. SAMPLE USED
The sample appeared randomly over three months after the question was posted to the group of
practitioners of knowledge management (KM Practitioner Group). The analysis of this random
sample shows that all respondents work in the area of knowledge management, document or
information.
From the standpoint of origin respondents are from different countries, i.e. 61% of the United
States (5), UK (4) or South Africa. The others are from Australia (2), Netherlands (2),
Ukraine, Belgium, Canada, India, with one representative each, and an uninformed (CHART 1).
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6. Australia
Belgium
Canada
India
N.I.
Netherlands
South Africa
Ukraine
United Kingdom
USA
CHART 1 - Origin of respondents (N.I. = No Information)
As the main function they fulfill, those who participated in the discussion were divided into four
categories: managers (for those who had a managerial position), entrepreneurs,
consultants, analysts (for professionals who do not have managerial position) and academics (Table 1).
TABLE 1 - Activity of Respondents
Category Number
Managers 9
Consultants 6
Entrepreneurs 2
Academics 1
Analysts 4
Not Specified 1
Total 23
With regard to the type of company, 70% work in private companies and 26% in public companies, a
participant didn’t identify in what kind of company he work. In summary, this is a sample
with experience and knowledge of the subject proposed in the post (LINKEDIN, 2011).
The group where the question was posted, KM Practitioners Group, had in July 2011
1714 members. This community was created in July 2008 on LinkedIn by Judi Sandrock, writer and
consultant, from the South Africa. However, Knowledge Management Practitioners' Group in
Johannesburg, South Africa existed since 2000. The purpose of this nonprofit group is to share
knowledge and experience about the management and practice of knowledge sharing can be
successful in business (KM, 2011).
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7. This is not the only group dedicated to knowledge management on LinkedIn. There are other
groups with the largest number of participants as the Knowledge Management Experts (3257),
the Gurteen Knowledge Community (2615) and KM Edge (1868).
LinkedIn, which hosted KM Practitioners Group, is a professional social network which operates
since 2003 and currently has over 100 million members in 200 countries. In Brazil there are more than
three million members (LINKEDIN, 2011).
6. RESEARCH RESULTS
According to the participants of the discussion, three most influential theorists of knowledge
management are Davenport, Prusak and Nonaka. Table 2 shows the scholars who obtained at least
two votes. Complete list is given in Annex A.
TABLE 2 - Theorists who received more than 1 vote
№ Name Group H Index Documents Citations Co-authors
1 Davenport, T. H. 6 15 35 1074 60
2 Nonaka, I. 4 14 27 1672 27
3 Prusak, L. 4 8 15 518 14
4 Senge, P. 3 6 27 413 38
5 Wenger, E. 3 1 3 307 3
6 Drucker, P. 2 8 34 642 8
7 Boisot, M. 2 6 18 485 13
8 Sveiby, K. 2 3 6 53 2
9 Lambe, P. 2 1 1 0 0
Source: Scopus (2011) and LinkedIn (2011)
Among those who received at least two votes for two prominent presences are Wenger and Lambe,
because both have low H index in Scopus. Note that, Hirotaka Takeuchi, co-author of Nonaka in one
of his major works, has H index equal to 2. On the other hand, among those with only one vote are:
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8. TABLE 3 - Theorists who received 1 vote
№ Name Group H Index Documents Citations Co-authors
11 Chia, R. 1 13 21 557 12
12 Szulanski, G. 1 11 15 1762 12
13 Buckman, R. 1 11 45 688 120
14 Brown. J. S. 1 9 40 2017 50
15 Argote, L. 1 9 28 1301 21
16 Duguid, P. 1 7 16 1092 2
17 Zack, M.H. 1 6 11 481 8
18 Henderson, J.C. 1 5 14 531 17
19 Quinn J.B. 1 5 25 393 40
20 Argyris, C. 1 4 17 338 0
21 Dixon, N. 1 3 4 31 7
Source: Scopus (2011) and LinkedIn (2011)
I have noticed that the relationship between the scholars chosen by the group and data received via H
index (only those who had more than one vote) is very strong - correlation coefficient makes
0.76. When making the same comparison excluding authors with H index greater than or equal to 1, the
correlation power is lower (0.49), but still significant. The sensitivity analysis with respect to data
used in the correlation is shown in the Table 4.
TABLE 4 - Correlation between votes received and index H
Correlation type Correlation Number
All votes received index and H ≠ 0 0.4603 28
Index H ≥ 1 0.4117 24
Index H> 1 0.4911 19
Over a 1 vote 0.7624 9
Source: Scopus (2011) and author's analysis.
7. CONCLUSION
The choices made by the group were supported by the index H revealed from the Scopus database. The
two most important theorists pointed out by the group – Nonaka and Davenport - are also those with the
higher H index. The calculation of the correlation also shows a strong connection between the list of
top nine rated scholars and their respective H indexes. Finally, we can conclude that the perception and
opinion stated collectively, generated in a social network, supports the relationship found between the
number of papers published by academics and the number of citations obtained by such studies (as
evidenced by the index H) and, therefore, reliable.
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9. REFERENCES
1. ARISTOTLE. The Categories, Project Gutenberg's text. November, 2000. available at
<http://www.dominiopublico.gov.br/download/texto/gu002412.pdf>. Accessed on April 12,
2010.
2. Davenport, T. H; Prusak, L. Knowledge and Business Organizations Manage your Intellectual
Capital. Methods and Practical Applications. Rio de Janeiro: Campus, 1998.
3. GRIFFITHS, D. Redefining KM: New Principles for Better Practice. Ark Publications:
London, 2011.
4. HIRSCH, J. E. An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output. PNAS 102
(46): 16569-16572. Available at:
<http://www.pnas.org/content/102/46/16569.full.pdf+html>. Accessed on July 10, 2011.
5. KM. The Knowledge Management Practitioners' Group. Johannesburg (South Africa). Available
at: <http://kmpractitioners.com/?q=node/1> Accessed on July 13, 2011.
6. LINKEDIN. Available in <http://press.linkedin.com/about>. Accessed on July 13, 2011.
7. LINKEDIN. Who is the most influential Knowledge Management theorist? And why? Posted
in Linkedin on April, 2011. Available at: <http://linkd.in/ocGZze>. 2011.
8. NONAKA, I.; TAKEUCHI, H. The Knowledge-creating company: How Japanese
companies create the dynamics of innovation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
9. O'DELL; C.; HUBERT, C. The New Edge in Knowledge: How Knowledge Management Is
10. Changing the Way We Do Business. New Jersey: Wiley, 2011. 236p.
11. POLANYI, M. The Tacit Dimension. Routledge and Kegan Paul: London, UK, 1966.
12. SCOPUS. What does it cover? Scopus. Available at:
http://www.info.sciverse.com/scopus/scopus-in-detail/facts. Accessed on June 23, 2011.
13. WONNACOTT, R.J.; WONNACOTT, T.H. Econometria. Rio de Janeiro: Technical and
scientific books, 1978.
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10. Annex A - Full list of Scholars with votes received and index H
TABLE 4 – Full list of Scholars with votes received and index H
№ Name Group H Index
1 Davenport, T. H. 6 15
2 Nonaka, I. 4 14
3 Prusak, L. 4 8
4 Senge, P. 3 6
5 Wenger, E. 3 1
6 Drucker, P. 2 8
7 Boisot, M. 2 6
8 Sveiby, K. 2 3
9 Lambe, P. 2 1
10 Kandel, E. R. 1 81
11 Chia, R. 1 13
12 Szulanski, G. 1 11
13 Quinn J.B. 1 5
14 No‡, A. 1 11
15 Buckman, R. 1 11
16 Brown. J. S. 1 9
17 Argote, L. 1 9
18 Duguid, P. 1 7
19 Zack, M.H. 1 6
20 Henderson , J.C. 1 5
21 Argyris, C. 1 4
22 Dixon, N. 1 3
23 Orna, E. 1 2
24 Kimiz, D. 1 1
25 McElroy, M. W. 1 1
26 Curry, A. 1 1
27 Schultz, W. 1 1
28 Stewart, T. A. 1 1
29 Sennett, R 1 1
30 Bridges, W. 1 0
31 Amindon, D. 1 0
32 Geus, A. P. 1 0
33 Newman, B. 1 0
34 Gurteen, D. 1 0
35 Klein, G. L. 1 0
36 Collins, J. C 1 N.A.
37 Kahn, A. 1 N.A.
38 Pang, A. 1 N.A.
N.A. Not Available Note: authors grayed out area of work is different than Knowledge
Management, Information Management or Strategic Management.
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11. Annex B - Contribution of Theorists Mentioned
From the viewpoint of the main contribution, the participants' perception of community
practitioners is described below:
TABLE 5 – Contribution of Theorists Mentioned
Name Votes Contribution
received
Davenport, T. 6 Information Management
Nonaka, I. 4 Organizational Knowledge Creation
Prusak, L. 4 Information Management
Senge, P. 3 Learning Organizations
Wenger, E. 2 Communities of Practice
Drucker, P. 2 Strategy and concept of knowledge worker
Boisot, M. 2 I-Space Model
Sveiby, K. 2 Metrics for knowledge management
Lambe, P. 2 Knowledge Management history and taxonomy
Chia, R. 1 N.A.
Szulanski, G. 1 Knowledge transfer (knowledge stickness)
Quinn J.B. 1 Translate the concepts of commitment and expertise into
the customer value
Buckman, R. 1
Brown. J. S. 1
Argote, L. 1 N.A.
Duguid, P. 1 N.A.
Zack, M.H. 1 Ability to synthesize key concepts and theories
Henderson, J. C. 1
Stewart, T.A. 1 Theory of the Intelligent Enterprise
Argyris, C. 1
Dixon, N. 1 Concept of Common Knowledge
Orna, E. 1 Knowledge auditing and the groundwork for strategy/roadmap
N.A.: Not Available, i.e., the participant mentioned the author but did not tell what the most relevant
contribution was.
Source: LINKEDIN (2011th)
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