What is Knowledge Management?

Welcome to the fourth issue of the International Journal of Knowledge Management. In this issue we present an invited paper from Clyde Holsapple and Meenu Singh that begins a discussion on the value of KM to an organization. Three research articles are also presented which explore frameworks for KM to improve productivity, knowledge acquisition and transfer in Egypt, and using KM to foster innovation. In this issue, I want to tackle an important question: What is Knowledge Management (KM)? I did not address this sooner as I naively thought we knew what KM was. After all, we have a community of researchers and conferences where we meet and it seemed to me that we all knew what we were talking about. However, the last few weeks have made me doubt this assumption. Recently, I was asked several times to define KM. This would not surprise me except that I expected most of those asking to know what KM was as they were academics and professionals who were at least mildly familiar with our literature. This was followed by the publication of an expert opinion in the Business Intelligence Journal that convinced me of the need to discuss this question. EDITORIAL PREFACE