Dissemination in Portals

IntroductIon While there are many aspects to managing corporate knowledge, one key issue is how to disseminate corporate documents with appropriate context. Upon finding an article on a certain subject, for example the material properties of titanium, a reader is likely to be interested in related articles such as applications of titanium or manufacturing methods for titanium parts. Each related article has the potential to increase the reader's knowledge of the subject. Therefore, organizing documents into categories of interest plays an essential role in discovering and interpreting information. Furthermore, categories can be expected to provide historical context, describing how titanium was used in early designs or initial practices used for the repair of titanium parts. While most large companies make a practice of cataloging and controlling well-established documents, there is a vast set of explicit information that has not traditionally been effectively disseminated. This class of information is less formal and may be exchanged, updated, and otherwise managed at the local level. Such information is usually not controlled at the corporate level or governed by the same organizations established to handle more stable information. Processes to disseminate such information tend to be ad hoc or nonexistent. In this article, we discuss the elements necessary to effectively disseminate informal and explicit information not controlled 1529 Dissemination in Portals at the enterprise level. While the main emphasis of the article is to promote a general process for the dissemination of this type of material in large corporations, we will use a specific implementation of this process at the Boeing Company as an illustrative example.