Has KM turned the corner? Has it passed away? Is there a future for this field or is KM morphing into something else? Have we been incorporated in mainstream management and transformed into a handful of cute clichés? Did we ever really break away from the charge of being a fad?

True to its diffuse, elemental nature the field of KM still pirouettes on questions like these.

And it can still spark a good debate in some hallways. But after 20 years of winding its path(s) this field of study and practice is now actually considered as such by a number of academic and business organizations. It is not so considered by others, however, despite the fact that increasing numbers of graduate students are trained every year and the scientific literature is gaining breadth and depth. The industry around KM has gone through its bumps and grinds but seems to have shaken out onto a relatively productive, if subdued, plateau. And the foibles of selective perception and contextual action being what they are, most of us believe we encounter more companies doing KM of one sort or another, in more sophisticated ways. With some actually intoning the prescription, “Well sure … this is the only way to manage things today isn’t it?”

Against this backdrop it is indeed a pleasure to assume the editorial role for EJKM … and many thanks to Feral McGrath for having carried the ball this far. We come to the job fresh from exciting times at ECKM 2004 (130 participants, 32 countries, 6 of the 7 continents) and motivated by having spent too many months administrating academia. EJKM is to Despres and Chauvel as KM is to many of you: a platform for making a difference, a way of molding some of the future that imposes itself.

We have plans. You have plans. One of our plans for EJKM is to actively reach out to you, the KM community, to co‑construct plans and actions that will develop a more robust and exciting community. This is patently reflexive but would you really have it any other way?

This issue of EJKM submits 8 articles that hail from Africa, Australia, Europe, North America and the UK that present some ideas that are genuinely new, and other that deepen our existing literature. Daneshgar & Amaravadi propose an awareness framework for sharing contextual knowledge among office workers in networked companies in order to support collaborative business processes. Durcikova & Everard focus on the issue of knowledge sharing among individuals and develop a typology that has academic and practitioner implications. Péter Fehér investigates the relationship between factors supporting change management and KM processes. Folorunso & Ogunde suggest that data mining and its implementation techniques are useful enablers of KM programs. Andrew Goh provides an empirical assessment of the influence that competence frameworks and utilization exert on innovation and firm performance. Handzic & Chaimungkalanont study the impact of socialization on organizational creativity and suggest that informal mechanisms have a stronger positive effect than formal ones. Hughes & Jackson investigate the world of KM in law enforcement and provide an explanatory sociotechnical model. And Hong Kun Wong argues that a knowledge value chain provides more operational and explanatory power than the conventional business value chain for assessing or managing organizational performance.

We will be in touch with you soon.