Knowledge management (KM) is mainly a social process, involving peoples’ attitudes, behaviors, opinions and islands of information and knowledge scattered all over the public sector and the society itself. It is a paradox that despite being a social process, KM is by and large absent from social services provision and support in the Social Administration (SA) field of public administration. This paper tries to set the scene for using KM in the SA field, proposes the infusion of KM into the main social services’ business processes, classifies relevant knowledge assets in SA and identifies information technologies that could enable a paradigm shift for SA from the top-down orientation in policy making and services provision to an knowledge based bottom-up approach, in order to increase efficiency and effectiveness. Two short cases are discussed to propose KM as a key driver for designing social administration’s information systems for improved social services: the social security contribution evasion problem and the organization of a knowledge-based service desk to support social administration’s stakeholders.