Integrating Organizational Knowledge Sources into a Knowledge Management Portal

Abstract

This paper presents a practical (non-academic) case study of organisational knowledge-resource sharing through the corporate knowledge management portal at Mobarakeh Steel Company in Isfahan, Iran. It explains how a structured portal was designed and implemented to integrate dispersed knowledge assets, improve access to organisational experience, and support learning across operational and managerial domains. In many industrial organisations, valuable knowledge is created through operations, maintenance and repair, projects, audits, training, and continuous improvement activities; however, retrieval and reuse are often difficult because knowledge artefacts are distributed across multiple units and information systems. The experience reported in this paper shows how the portal was developed as a pragmatic response to this dispersion challenge. The portal was designed to provide a single point of access to a portfolio of knowledge resources, while explicitly considering organisational structure, content ownership, and access-control policies. The initiative was informed by established knowledge management concepts as well as practical frameworks for assessing and developing knowledge management capabilities (Alavi and Leidner, 2001; Bhatt, 2001; Davenport and Prusak, 1998; APQC, 2025). The paper also describes how the organisational context influenced the portal’s evolution. Prior experience in technology transfer, the implementation of management systems, the development of quality procedures and document control, training and empowerment mechanisms, and organisational excellence initiatives provided the foundation for more structured management of knowledge resources. Therefore, the portal emerged not as a standalone digital tool, but as part of a broader organisational effort to capture, reuse, and share knowledge. In this process, institutional standards and approaches, including ISO-based practices, contributed to structuring and consolidating the initiative (ISO, 2019).