Developing Conceptual Model of Knowledge Portals in Higher Education Institutions

The ability to create, share, obtain and better manage knowledge is becoming of increasing importance for institutions. Knowledge and intellectual capital are seen as assets which can provide competitive advantage over rivals. As a result much work has gone into the building of formal channels for institutions to share knowledge internally as well as obtain quality external knowledge, to ensure that lecturers can be enriched with current practices. Technology has been a support tool, which assists the formal knowledge exchange process.
Portal technologies have become more important in recent times as these information technologies provide many benefits and can influence the underlying infrastructure of the Internet. Portal technologies are personalized gateways to sets of information, applications and services. Typically, portals are a layer above many underlying systems and group these systems together to provide a single point of access for the user. Many places of higher education institutions are implementing portal technologies to provide students with a personalized gateway to teaching, learning and administration facilities in a web environment. The movement for HEI's to include portals was further enhanced by the difficulties and constraints associated with intranets. Intranets require large staff resources to maintain the currency of the content, which is not always feasible. Furthermore, the ability for an intranet to obtain external information is difficult as the original notion of the intranet was to only access information locally. However, sometimes institutions wish to access information external to the organisation and information that is not available on the institutions intranet, therefore staff would have to use another way to retrieve external information.
A major benefit of portals is that they can provide access to all, both internal and external information making this technology appealing to many institutions. Portals are viewed as support tools for institutions personnel and should not disrupt the individual's work performance or the overall strategic goals of the institutions. But rather should assist institutions functions and goals. In this paper, the author discuss the stages of the KM process in terms of people responsible for providing various knowledge sharing activities. A typical KM process has planning, design, development and evaluation stages. This paper presents a conceptual model and map which can be adopted for building a Knowledge Management platform in Higher Education Institutions. It lists the steps to implement a KM initiatives/portal and discusses the sub parts of the portal, which can cater to the needs of the stakeholders of an Academic Institution.