The Empowering Role of Enterprise Information Portals in Knowledge Management

By Sharil Dewa

Today, more than ever, business is a key shaper of the emerging global society. The exchange of knowledge, materials, energy, and people; the blending of cultures; and the dissipation of geo-political boundaries are to a great extent the result of transnational business operations. The relevance of knowledge and the need for approaches to manage it became apparent first and foremost in the business world. Accessing, evaluating, managing, organizing, filtering, and distributing information in a manner that is useful to end users KM involves blending a company's internal and external information and turning it into actionable knowledge via a technology platform.

The Internet and its various applications have made many tasks easier than what they were in the past, including KM. For many companies and their staff nothing is important more than managing the information or knowledge they possess. The World Wide Web (WWW) has come to help these people and meet their information needs in an easy way. Usually every company has its own website on the Internet offering online information services to its members and clients. The more useful such web-based services would be, the more added values will be shifted towards users and more profits will be brought for the company in long term. So what kind of solution would be the best for such a purpose?

There have been many examined methods or solutions, but the increasing usage of EIPs has proved them as the most appropriate way of offering web-based services on a given subject to a defined class of users. EIPs' applied characteristics have reflected their empowering role in KM. So they may be regarded as useful means of knowledge management meeting most of KM objectives.

KM Process Position

Let’s start our discussion with determining the KM process position according to a managerial perspective then study EIPs related functions. There are three categories of business processes:

1. Operational processes: These are those that use knowledge but, apart from knowledge about specific events and conditions, do not produce or integrate it.
   There are two knowledge processes: knowledge production, the process an agent executes that produces new generalizing knowledge, and knowledge integration, the process that presents the new knowledge to agents comprising the producing agent.
   There are nine knowledge management processes, which are listed later. For now, note that their purposes are to enhance knowledge processing, to perform KM-level knowledge processing and to integrate the knowledge management function itself.
   
   
2. Knowledge production: This is a process made up of four task clusters (or sub-processes):
   a.  Information Acquisition
   1. Individual and Group Learning
   2. Knowledge Claim Formulation
   3. Knowledge Claim Evaluation

1. Knowledge Outcomes: Knowledge processes, of course, produce outcomes. From a managerial point of view, knowledge is an encoded, tested, evaluated and still surviving structure of information that helps the adaptive system (agent) that developed it to adapt.

How Things Work

Operational business processes are performed by agents who use previous knowledge in the DOKB, both mental knowledge and knowledge in organizational repositories to make decisions. Sometimes the DOKB and an agent's perceived situation doesn't provide the answers it needs. A problem has arisen--an epistemic gap between what an agent knows and what it needs to know to participate in the business process. Such a problem initiates knowledge processing, specifically a new knowledge production process. Once the problem is perceived, there is a need to formulate tentative solutions. Those can come from new individual and group learning addressing the problem, or from external sources through information acquisition, or from entirely creative knowledge claim formulation, or, of course, from all three.

Where the tentative solutions come from and in what sequence are of no importance to the self-organizing knowledge processing pattern of knowledge production. The only important thing about sequence here is that knowledge is not produced until the tentative solutions, the previously formulated knowledge claims, have been tested and evaluated in the knowledge claim evaluation sub-process. And that sub-process, Knowledge Claim Evaluation (KCE), is the way in which agents select among tentative solutions, competitive alternatives, by comparing them against each other in the context of perspectives, criteria or newly created ideas for selecting among them to arrive at the solution to the problem motivating knowledge production.

Portals, Knowledge Processing and Knowledge Management

The point made in connection with IT applications, in general, applies with equal force to enterprise information portals. Whether any particular portal product or solution supports knowledge processing and KM is not a question whose answer should be assumed. The answer instead should flow from careful analysis of the extent to which a product and whether, in so doing, it aids knowledge management in enhancing the KLCs within an organization, and with them the organization’s adaptive capability.

When a portal product provides appreciable support for KLC and KM processes, and especially when it supports the critical KCE process, it is proper to call that portal an enterprise knowledge portal (EKP). But until then, we should resist using that term and recognize that however desirable the halo effect of the name, the application involved is one that has not yet crossed the line from mere information processing and management to knowledge processing and KM.