Designing Portals for Knowledge Work

An increasing share of work in businesses and organizations depends on information and knowledge rather than manual labor and physical goods (Wolf, 2005). Knowledge work contributes substantially to the long-term success of an organization. It is characterized by unstructured, creative, and learning-oriented tasks and involves access to a wide variety of structured and unstructured data sources such as Web sites, databases, data warehouses, document bases, or messaging systems. Knowledge work is often hampered by the fragmentation of resources across these numerous elements of information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructures. Consequently, concepts for the design and implementation of integrating technologies are required in order to improve ICT support for knowledge work. Originally, the term “portal” has been coined to denote the organized access to Internet resources by search engines and a categorized collections of links (Smith, 2004, p. 93). The metaphor has been extended to integrated access to data sources and applications or, in more recent terminology, contents, and services within businesses and organizations called enterprise (information) portal. Recently, emphasis seems to shift toward semantic integration of data and knowledge sources, services, persons, and processes referred to as knowledge portals (Collins, 2003; Firestone, 2003, p. 30ff; Hädrich & Priebe, 2005; Sandkuhl, 2005; Schwabe & Salim, 2002). This article reflects the ambitious goals and challenges of knowledge portals and proposes the concept of knowledge work situations for the design of knowledge portals.