In recent years there has been a renewed interest in `human resources' and `collaboration' under the term `Knowledge Management,' for strategic success of the organizations. The focus of industrialized economies is shifting from tangible assets to intellectual assets. In such a situation, the management of knowledge is fast becoming a process of creating value from knowledge that is otherwise an intangible asset in the organization's balance sheet. As knowledge is being treated as an asset, the need for its management has assumed importance.

Knowledge Management is fast emerging as a core strategy that organizations worldwide are adopting to manage and leverage organizational knowledge for sustainable business advantage. Knowledge Management is the process through which organizations generate value from their intellectual and knowledge-based assets. It involves capturing and disseminating knowledge among employees, departments and organizational units in an effort to device best practices. It is a discipline that promotes an integrated approach to identifying, managing and sharing all of an enterprise's assets, including database, documents, policies and procedures as well as unarticulated expertise and experience of individual workers.

Knowledge Management is currently headed towards becoming a permanent fixture in the business landscape. Companies are managing their knowledge assets in the same way they managed their physical assets. Capture the asset and put it in one place so that it can be easily accessed. For physical goods, the storage point was the warehouse; for the intellectual equivalent, it is the knowledge repository or knowledge warehouse.

Today, in many companies, the knowledge warehouse is full. The shelves are overflowing, and seekers of knowledge are having a difficult time finding what they need. The Knowledge Management programs currently on, are incomplete to sustain the service of its core function. When companies realized they had too many physical assets in the warehouse, they began thinking about supply chain management or closely matching the supply of goods with demand and reducing inventories to what was actually needed for production processes.

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