Knowledge portals and the emerging digital knowledge workplace

Abstract

A fundamental aspect of knowledge management is capturing knowledge and expertise created by knowledge workers as they go about their work and making it available to a larger community of colleagues. Technology can support these goals, and knowledge portals have emerged as a key tool for supporting knowledge work. Knowledge portals are single-point-access software systems intended to provide easy and timely access to information and to support communities of knowledge workers who share common goals. In this paper we discuss knowledge portal applications we have developed in collaboration with IBM Global Services, mainly for internal use by Global Services practitioners. We describe the role knowledge portals play in supporting knowledge work tasks and the component technologies embedded in portals, such as the gathering of distributed document information, indexing and text search, and categorization; and we discuss new functionality for future inclusion in knowledge portals. We share our experience deploying and maintaining portals. Finally, we describe how we view the future of knowledge portals in an expanding knowledge workplace that supports mobility, collaboration, and increasingly automated project workflow.