Identifying Barriers to using Business-to-Employee (B2E) Portals: Some Lessons Learned from an Australian University

Business-to-employee (B2E) portal is an e-business initiative which if successfully implemented assists organisations in delivering useful information and services to their disperse employees which in turn creates productive and satisfied workforce needed for today's fast pace environment. However, despite considerable business values, the acceptance of B2E portals by employees working within organisations is reported to be slow. It is not clearly known exactly what barriers organisations encounter and how those barriers affect the usage of B2E portals by employees. To address this gap in the literature, this paper presents the experience of a large Australian university in introducing an employee portal, reports a very disappointing usage of the portal by employees, and identifies a constellation of barriers which are then discussed using theoretical constructs drawn from diverse streams of related literature. Finally, the implications of the findings are discussed