Knowledge management is an upcoming field of management, which focuses on maximizing business performance by making the most of the synergy between people, processes and technology.

It deals with issues critical to organizational adaptation, endurance and expertise in the wake of progressively more sporadic changes in the environment. In effect, it stands for organizational processes that engage a synergistic combination of data, information technology and the creativity of people. In other words, the knowledge aspect of business should be considered critical to it and should reflect in strategy, policy and practice the overall functioning of the organization.

Moreover, knowledge management is all about establishing the link between an organizations obvious and implied intellectual property and positive business outcome.

In practice, however, it involves an organization recognizing and mapping its intellectual assets, creating knowledge for competitive advantage, making large amounts of business information available, and allocating the best practices and technology that facilitates all of the above, including groupware and intranet.

Knowledge management is not easy to define precisely or simply. It is a complex domain, like management itself. However, there are noteworthy connections between knowledge management and many popular management practices and strategies, including best practices, change management, benchmarking and risk management, to mention a few.

Largely, the business community also sees knowledge management as an accepted extension of business process reengineering. Most recent business strategies accept and recognize that information and knowledge are its assets, and policies, strategies and tools are needed in order to manage those assets.

The need to manage knowledge cannot be denied, but not many have acted upon that need. Wherever knowledge management is being implemented, it may stretch from technology-oriented methods of gaining access to, managing and delivering information, to substantial efforts at changing the organizational culture.