Some Collaborative Systems Approaches in Knowledge-Based Environments

In the present global economy, strongly influenced by IT (information technology) and information systems evolution, the modern organizations try to face the challanges 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 a sudden necessity to adopt, for maintaining all kind of virtual activities/processes, the latest technologies/systems that are capable to support integrated collaboration in business services. 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. Some issues regarding collaborative systems are explored and a portal-based IT solution that sustains the KM life cycle is highlighted. In addition, an agile development framework for portals will be proposed