User Acceptance Affecting the Adoption of Enterprise Portals

Abstract

The implementation of enterprise portals has been cited as the most important business information project of the next decade (Collins, 1999; Daniel & Ward, 2005). However, introducing enterprise portals can cause resistance and confusion among users. Often, portals provide a completely new work environment based on new user interfaces structuring content, services, and applications in a very different manner (Kakamanu & Mezzacca, 2005; Shilakes & Tylman, 1998). In addition, enterprise portals often provide new functions and features that, at first, can overload the user. Although the development and introduction of enterprise portals is already considered as a complex and challenging task (De Carvalho, Ferreira, & Choo, 2005), the subsequent process of getting end-users to accept and adopt the portal in their daily work processes is even more challenging. Often, this is seen as the most crucial factor to making the portal solution a success (Aiken & Sullivan, 2002; Kakamanu & Mezzacca, 2005). Models and methods for measuring and increasing the acceptance of enterprise portals are expected to contribute significantly to a successful, efficient, and economic portal implementation. In the past, this led to a number of different portal acceptance models, each with certain advantages and weaknesses. Usually, the models focus on one or a few particular portal implementation projects, for example, a human-resource portal or a consumer portal. The broad range of different enterprise portal implementations, starting with extranet portals providing in-depth content and offering special advantages for business-to-business or e-commerce activities, up to intranet portals supporting internal communication and knowledge management, demands a highly flexible and adaptable framework supporting the systematic identification of individually important, measurable, and independent acceptance criteria. In this article, such a general purpose model, called the dynamic acceptance model for the reevaluation of technologies (DART), is presented. We start by reviewing existing portal acceptance models. Subsequently, we present the DART model and its application in one exemplary enterprise portal implementation. Finally, we summarize our key findings and outline further trends in portal acceptance research.