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. A ll human work, even the most physical labor, involves cognitive capabilities, but the hallmark of human work in the latter part of the twentieth century emphasizes knowledge work-solving problems and accomplishing goals by gathering, organizing, analyzing, creating, and synthesizing information and expertise. Knowledge work is performed by individuals who belong to communities of interest, where knowledge is shared and accumulated. Knowledge management (KM) refers to the methods and tools for capturing, storing, organizing, and making accessible knowledge and expertise within and across communities. Communities of interest may be scientific, academic, business-oriented, or government-based. We focus here on the corporate environment, since this is where KM is most self-consciously addressed, and where supporting technologies are expanding most rapidly. At the broadest level (to paraphrase Prusak 1), KM refers to all the tools, technologies, practices, and incentives deployed by an organization to "know what it knows" and to make this knowledge available to people who need to know it when they need to know it. At the individual or team level, the KM flow is a cycle in which solving a problem leads to new knowledge, initially tacit (that is, known but unexpressed), and then made explicit when experiences are documented, distributed, and shared (via databases, e-mail, or presentations). Once explicit, the knowledge is used by others for solving new problems. 2,3 The application of the explicit knowledge to a new problem creates new tacit knowledge, with the potential of initiating a new KM cycle. In this general cycle lie a host of technical, social, and humancomputer interaction issues. In this paper we focus on the technology and, specifically, on what have come to be called knowledge portals.
