Knowledge management support of decision making

Over the past few years, there has been an explosion of interest in the field of knowledge manageŽ . ment KM . In the corporate world, a 1998 Delphi Group survey found that over half of the respondents report active 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 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 capabiliŽ . ties of decision support systems DSSs . This premise stems from several observations: