Some Considerations About Collaborative Systems Supporting Knowledge Management in Organizations

In the present global economy, strongly influenced by IT (information technology) and information systems evolution, the modern organizations try to face the challenges by adjusting their strategies and restructuring their activities, for aligning them to the new economy requirements. It is certain, that the enterprise’s performance will depend on the capacity to sustain collaborative work. The evolution of information systems in these collaborative environments led to the sudden necessity to adopt, for maintaining the virtual activities/processes, the latest technologies/systems that are capable to support integrated collaboration in business services. Stating this, we mean collaborative systems of different type: conversational tools, multi-agent systems, and all these, among various enterprise applications, integrated in portal-based IT platforms. It is obvious, that all collaborative environments workgroups, practice communities, collaborative enterprises) are based on knowledge, and between collaboration and knowledge management (KM) there is a strong interdependence. Therefore, we focused on how collaborative systems are capable to sustain knowledge management and their impact on optimizing the KM life cycle. We explore some issues regarding collaborative systems and propose a portal-based IT solution that sustains the KM life cycle through a distributed architecture. All considerations have a strong research background, our portal-based proposal for sustaining knowledge management in organizations being subject of some Romanian research projects that are fitting in the European research demarches.