Through good times and bad, KM practices have been at the core of the more successful IT firms. Global IT firms are successfully leveraging KM to capture best practices, improve project management, nurture innovation, enhance customer service, reuse software code, and expand across boundaries of technology generations and varying maturity levels of markets. In fact, IT companies feature very prominently in the list of winners of awards like the annual MAKE awards, conducted by Teleos in association with The KNOW Network.
In the IT sector, software is often called the "quintessential knowledge industry," with software being an artifact which is purely a knowledge creation and which defies Industrial-Age economics thanks to a zero cost of duplication and near-zero cost of distribution in the Internet Age.

Some other characteristics of the software industry include the relatively high degree of autonomy of the workers and their independence in career planning, a higher proportion of telework or remote computing, high degrees of churn as employees quickly move to other pastures or hive off their own start-ups, and the requirement of co-location in customer premises for contracts involving outsourcing (which can raise problems in terms of connectivity to remote systems and even cultural mismatch). Each of these throws up interesting twists for HR managers and KM planners of IT companies.

EDS has a vast architecture for knowledge sharing and innovation across its global force, which includes the Techlore technical knowledge repository and 114 communities of practice with over 28,000 members. EMC's secure Web portal, Powerlink, facilitates collaboration between thousands of customer service agents who access more than 21,000 knowledge articles in the EMC Knowledgebase.

KM at Fujitsu Consulting is powered by the Knowledge Access System (KAS) portal and tools like ProjectFinder; it uses handheld wireless devices in the spread of KM at multiple "trigger points." i2's Knowledge Base and Project Workbench help product developers and marketers in India and the United States improve upon software quality for their products and supply chain performance for their customers. Emerging KM trends identified in IBM include tighter linkage of KM to HR initiatives and enterprise content management; the biggest hurdles are culture, scale, and infrastructure.

i-flex's KM initiative is heavily based on process automation, as per the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) framework developed by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie-Mellon University. i-flex has unveiled a plethora of schemes and tools on its i-Share KM portal, like the QuBase repository of methodologies, the Promotr project tracking tool, Project Closure Documents (PCD), the i-CleaR corporate learning repository, i-Suggest process improvement suggestion scheme, K-Forum for employees to seek solutions on unresolved issues, business intelligence monitoring contextualized with respect to i-flex's positioning, and K-Webcast conferences with i-flex experts hosted on the intranet called i-Opener.