ABSTRACT
WI T H I N T H E F I E L D O F IS/IT there has been a tendency to embrace newconcepts so that the field has been populated by example after example of one fad or fashion after another (Galliers & Newell, 2001). A key problem here is that these ‘latest fads’ often appear to disregard past learning from the IS/IT literature. So, for example, while Davenport (1996) belatedly referred to Business Process Reengineering (BPR) as ‘the fad that forgot people’, so Knowledge Management (KM) has been criticized for emphasizing technology at the expense of people (Scarbrough, Swan & Preston, 1999). Moreover, these different IS/IT fashions are often conceptually rather different from one another. Indeed, it has been argued that each new fashion follows on from the last in the sense that it addresses the problems that were an unintended negative consequence of the previous one (Benders & van Veen, 2001). For example, BPR was typically associated with down-sizing, which meant that many employees were made redundant as organizations sought to improve the efficiency of their business processes and reduce costs. Many organizations subsequently found that an unintended negative consequence of their BPR initiative was a loss of organizational knowledge, which they had quite literally allowed to ‘walk out the door’ in the form of redundant employees. Subsequent KM initiatives were arguably a response to this problem.
