Guest Editor: Clyde W. Holsapple

University of Kentucky

Over the past two years there has been an explosion of interest in the field of knowledge management. In the corporate world, a 1998 Delphi Group survey found that over half of the respondents report active knowledge management (KM) efforts in their firms, nearly half see KM as a strategic issue, and 80% see KM as making important contributions to business practice. In academia, KM is finding its way into courses, KM research centers are being formed, and endowed professorships in KM have begun to appear. There has been a flurry of new periodicals devoted to KM, a steadily growing stream of conferences dealing with KM, a burst of new vendors offering novel KM technologies, and the rise of professional KM organizations such as the Knowledge Management Consortium and the Institute for Knowledge Management.

This call for papers of a special issue of the Decision Support Systems journal is based on a premise that the vibrant activity along the KM frontier can advance our understanding of decision support and the capabilities of decision support systems. This premise stems from several observations:

1. Knowledge management is concerned with the representation and processing of knowledge by humans, machines, organizations, and societies.
2. An aim of KM is to ensure that the right knowledge is available in the right forms to the right entities at the right times for the right costs.
3. Decision making is a knowledge-intensive activity with knowledge as its raw materials, work-in-process, by-products, and finished goods.
4. Computer-based decision support systems employ various KM techniques to represent and process knowledge of interest to decision makers, including descriptive knowledge (e.g., data, information), procedural knowledge (e.g., algorithms), and reasoning knowledge (e.g., rules).
5. There are multiple useful techniques for managing knowledge in the course of making a decision.
6. Proficiency in knowledge management is increasingly important to the competitiveness of decision makers as we rapidly move into the global knowledge society.

Submissions for the special issue should present innovative and interesting theories, practices, technologies, or methods dealing with the role of knowledge management in decision making. Technical, conceptual, and empirical papers are invited. Topics of interest include but are not limited to: