In the 21st century, organisations are faced with complex challenges stemming from increasing opportunities to create economic value by integrating corporate environmental and social responsibility change issues into business. Due to globalisation and the complexity of issues associated with working in a knowledge economy, the potential offered by emerging information and communication technologies along with commitment to the principle of sustainability pose profound strategic challenges for businesses. These complex challenges call for new and innovative solutions and approaches; and they demand new knowledge, resources, and perspectives often found outside current organisational processes and practices. A major challenge facing organisations is uncovering the most effective methods of capturing, mapping, sharing and applying stakeholders’ knowledge en route to economic value creation by integrating corporate environmental and social sustainability issues into business. Hence, for organisations, a robust knowledge management (KM) approach or framework for continuously yet effectively, addressing the sustainability issues is desirable. Corporate knowledge portals present the potential for providing organisations with a rich and complex shared information and knowledge workspace for the generation, capturing, mapping, sharing and using of collaborative knowledge which addresses sustainability issues for decision making. This paper primarily reports on the findings of an on-going research study, which is focused on managing change and knowledge associated with sustainability initiatives for organisational competitiveness. It involved semistructured interviews with twenty six professionals from seventeen UK organisations in four sectors - construction, utility, transportation and nongovernmental organisational sectors. It reviews the key concepts of sustainability and KM, and challenges associated with managing stakeholders’ knowledge in addressing sustainability issues. It also presents a conceptual knowledge portal framework for organisations to manage stakeholders’ knowledge in addressing sustainability issues. The paper concludes that taking the knowledge of stakeholders into account can be particularly useful in addressing sustainability issues. The key challenges impacting on the successful implementation of knowledge portals to address corporate sustainability issues effectively are lack of leadership, commitment from top management, organisational culture, people and technology.
Keywords: collaboration, corporate social responsibility, knowledge portal, stakeholders, sustainability.