Conventional information systems require an understanding of the relationships of data, identifying and documenting rules for managing data and ensuring that data are accurate and maintain integrity. The traditional convergent and consensus building constructs of such systems are suited for stable and predictable organizational environments relying primarily on rules and procedures embedded in technology. However, such constructs are misaligned with today's dynamically changing business environment - notably in the intelligence and law enforcement and prosecutorial environments.

Today's business world does not place a premium on playing by predefined rules, but rather on understanding and adapting as the rules of the game - as well as the game itself - keep changing. Such changing business rules, conventions and assumptions are suggested by the emergence of virtual corporations and the interdependencies of "business ecosystems."

Increasingly, intelligence, law enforcement and litigation agencies are moving toward strategic, nonlinear and systemic views of information. They are moving toward defining their use of Knowledge Management as directed to the critical issues of organizational adaptation, survival and competence in the face of increasingly discontinuous environmental change. This embodies organizational processes that seek the synergistic combination of data and the information-processing capacity of information technologies, and the creative and innovative capacity of human beings.

Knowledge Management is becoming the collective term for identifying, locating, capturing and sharing relevant information in a timely manner. Comprising this are processes to access, search, manage and route information

• Information Access management - supports management of information codified in either structured or unstructured repositories and databases (i.e., explicit knowledge)
• Process Knowledge - manages information inherent in a process (i.e., implicit knowledge)
• Knowledge Workplace - manages information held by the knowledge worker (i.e., tacit knowledge)
• E-Knowledge - manages integration of enterprise information from internal and external systems
• Intellectual Capital Management - manages the manner in which intellectual or knowledge capital is transformed into tangible assets available to the enterprise

Increasingly, the Knowledge Management market is being extended to all facets of an enterprise by adopting a web-based, networked environment. As agencies extend their systems to users in multiple, diverse locations - in different states and often in different countries - they leverage web-based Knowledge Management systems and software onto virtual private networks.

The demand on government agencies to work faster and smarter - improving service to the citizen - while implementing electronic government initiatives with a rapidly shrinking workforce, is forcing them to adopt knowledge management techniques and technologies. More and more, the market is becoming a web-based, networked environment. The need to share information within the government has taken on a heightened sense of urgency since the 2001 terrorist attacks.

See also Knowledge-Based Solutions - we understand today's need to quickly capture, retrieve, share and make sense of critical information. For more than 30 years we have been building and populating databases for our customers, continually applying new technologies to provide the highest quality, most efficient, most secure solutions possible.