Identifying Knowledge Assets in an Organisation

Abstract

The Internet has revolutionised the way that business is conducted by customers and organisations that serve them. Texts are now being devoted to explaining how e-business can be practically undertaken, for example see Lawrence et al. (2003). There is a rapidly emerging trend of organisations using Intranet portals for internal business processes and communication between employees and their organisation. This is well documented in this and other books, for example see Tatnall (2004). Systems that deploy Intranet portals with intelligent agents and e-processes have replaced routine procedural knowledge used by clerical and lower level management levels. These portals facilitate self-service as a first step toward developing more knowledge-intensive knowledge management (KM) portal applications. However, the greatest value to be derived from well-designed intranet portals is probably their potential as a KM tool (Lloyd-Walker & Soutar, 2005). Portals must be convenient to use and represent an advantage to users over more traditional means (Peansupap & Walker, 2005a). Also, appropriate change management practices should be adopted when planning, deploying, and applying portals as a tool for KM in an organisation to ensure that an appropriate knowledge sharing culture exists where both the organisation and its staff values and rewards knowledge-sharing (Fernie, Green, Weller, & Newcombe, 2003; Gupta & Govindarajan, 2000; Lloyd-Walker et al., 2005). We will now focus on our main theme of describing a prototype KM portal developed for a major Australian construction contractor. We set aside further detailed discussion of the important diffusion and adoption issues. These are addressed in depth elsewhere (Attewell, 1992; Peansupap & Walker, 2005b; Rogers, 1995). This article is structured as follows. We have provided a brief introduction to knowledge portals in this section and highlighted further references for ICT diffusion. In the next section, we provide background to the prototype KM portal tool to enable readers to understand its scope and limitations. In that section we also briefly explain how a soft systems methodology (SSM) approach facilitated the development of our ideas. We then focus our next section on describing the prototype. This is followed by a brief discussion of future trends and concluding comments. The value of this work lies in its novel approach to designing a knowledge portal and the conceptual work that supports this prototype KM system.