It is widely recognized that the transitions to an information society and a global knowledge economy will be the most important social and economic changes of the next decade. The global knowledge economy with its high innovation speed and an increasing demand of knowledge intensive products and services calls for new management tools and methods. Therefore, efficient management of knowledge has become imperative for almost all types of organizations.

Knowledge management can be addressed from two different perspectives. The first perspective places the emphasis on information technologies as enabling technologies. The second perspective is more people-oriented as it focuses on people and organizations. The difference between these two perspectives is the level at which knowledge management is applied.

The objective of technology-oriented knowledge management is to support knowledge workers at an operational level. That is, information technologies are used to provide the knowledge somebody needs to perform a specific task as well and as efficiently as possible. Often, this requires a careful and smooth integration of knowledge management tools with business process management tools.

In people-oriented knowledge management, the focus is on the people and the organization rather than on the technology. People-oriented knowledge management tries to find answers to questions such as "How can we improve our communication culture?", "How can we manage our human capital more efficiently?", "What methods and incentives exist to foster knowledge sharing and transfer in our organization?". In addition, impact assessment studies are part of people-oriented knowledge management. Typical questions in this context are "How do information technologies change an organization's communication culture?", "How do the employees of an organization get along with the new tools and the possibilities they offer?".