PORTALS and KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
Rodrigo Baroni de Carvalho*
PhD candidate at the Federal University of Minas Gerais,
School of Information Science
System analyst at the Bank of Development of Minas Gerais
Belo Horizonte, Brazil
Carvalho, Rodrigo Baroni; Ferreira, Marta; Choo, C.W.; Silva, Ricardo V. Analysis of the Effects of Enterprise Portals on Knowledge Management Projects: Exploratory Research on Brazilian and Portuguese Organizations. In: Encyclopaedia of Portals. Tatnall, Arthur (Ed.). Idea Group: Hershey, PA. Forthcoming end of 2006.
In an attempt to consolidate various departmental intranets, organizations are constructing corporate intranets or portals (Choo et al., 2000). They are becoming single points of entry through which users and communities can perform their business tasks, and also evolving into virtual places where people can get in touch with other people who share common interests. Due to this evolution from intranets towards portals, many organizations are using them as the major technological infrastructure of their knowledge management (KM) initiatives. KM studies analyze people, organizations, processes and technology. Although technology is not the main component of KM, it would be naive to implement KM without considering any technological support. KM is of particular relevance to Information Science and Information System research because technologies play a critical role in shaping organizational efforts for knowledge creation, acquisition, integration, valuation, and use (Sambarmurthy and Subramani, 2005). The purpose of this paper is to present a model which may be useful to help organizations in understanding the impacts of portal initiatives on KM initiatives. The research model, that is presented a little later, was based on TAM (Technology Acceptance Model), TTF (Task Technology Fit) and Knowing Organization Model (Choo, 1998), and was tested in 98 Brazilian and 70 Portuguese organizations.
Baroni de Carvalho, R., Ferreira, M.A.T., & Choo, C.W. (2005). Towards a Portal Maturity Model (PMM): Investigating Social and Technological Effects of Portals on Knowledge Management Initiatives. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Association of Information Science, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, June 2-4, 2005.
Abstract: The paper's purpose is to present the PMM (Portal Maturity Model) which can be used to assess the contributions of intranets and portals to Knowledge Management initiatives. The PMM was empirically tested in 62 organizations, and it is based on TAM, TTF, knowing organization model and KM maturity model.
*: Rodrigo Baroni was Visiting Scholar at the Faculty of Information Studies, July 2004 - July 2005. He successfully defended his PhD thesis in April 2006. He is currently a professor at FUMEC University in Belo Horizonte.