Intranets for Knowledge Management: Applications Affording User Participation

Most of today’s organisations implement intranets to support, amongst other things, their knowledge management processes. Although intranets appear to be ideal arenas for organisational members to meet and share knowledge quickly and efficiently, actual usage in organisational practice seems limited. Intranets are typically marginalised to one-way communication channels for corporate information. The ambition of this research has been to produce knowledge on how intranets can be designed to better support knowledge management in organisations. We argue a prerequisite for the intranet to function as a knowledge management platform is a critical mass of usage and a content relevant for everyday work. Building on the evaluation results of two implemented interest-based prototype systems, we posit that an intranet must be equipped with applications that actively afford user participation. In this paper we contribute knowledge on how such intranet applications for knowledge management can be designed to take advantage of users’ everyday actions. Such design-specific knowledge is important for organisations trying to transform their intranets from static electronic bulletin boards to useful knowledge management platforms.