Posted by Denham on July 16, 1999 at 14:48:03:

In Reply to: Corporate Portals for KM posted by John Bardos on July 14, 1999 at 16:22:07:

Greetings John,

Your question on the value of corporate portals as a KM technology is something I have been interested in for sometime too. Right now I must express a certain ambivalence to the concept, perhaps this reveals my lack of understanding!

Most of the portal applications seem to be nothing more than fancy 'active' knowledge maps, allowing easy navigation to diverse corporate repositories, a single entry page, some content customization and access to external data.

It is easy to see the value that portal aggregation brings, but is this sufficient to get excited about? Does it really help with knowledge creation, learning and synthesis?. I tend to view portals as a neat way to structure knowledge assets and ways to provide alert services. Most portal examples do little to assist with fundamental knowledge practices, sharing, structuring, learning, problem solving, capturing insights and solutions. Are portals just the glue that hold diverse information related applications together.

I have seen little action on the opportunity that portals offer: recommender systems to suggest content and more importantly people to connect to, spaces for deep dialog, different ways of classifying knowledge and providing access to joint indexes across repositories, automatic expertise profiling, reverse hyperlinking, i.e. linking from old conetnt to new additions and concept extraction.

For me, current portals are more hype, marketing and fluff than true tools for helping with knowledge creation, transfer or learning.

What am I missing here?

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• Re: Corporate Portals & KM John Bardos 14:59:33 7/24/99 (0)

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