Adoption of Portals Using Activity Theory

An obvious goal of a Web site today is to dynamically acquire content and make it available. A portal is a group of services provided electronically, through the Web, to a set of users. The items that are typically included in the portals consist of business intelligence, content and document management, enterprise resource planning systems, data warehouses, data-management applications, search and retrieval, and any other application. The ultimate portal provides the Holy Grail for organizational knowledge, true data aggregation and information integration coupled with knowledge worker collaboration (Roberts-Witt, 1999). A portal is the next evolutionary step in the use of Web browsers. There are different forms of portals ranging from simple to complex. Beginning with the simplest form of a portal, defined as “an information gateway that often includes a search engine plus additional organization and content,” to more sophisticated forms of portals (McCallum, Nigam, Rennie, & Seymore, 2000). Sophisticated examples include Yahoo and Alta Vista, (examples of horizontal portals) or high level university campus portals such as described in Eisler (2000) as examples of vertical portals. The services provided in a portal also vary widely with the purpose of it. Typically, services are personalization, member registration, e-mail and discussion boards, search engine, organization and indexing of content from internal and/or external sources. To use a portal, a user has to register in it and provide a name and password each time he/she uses it. This allows the system to personalize the services and contents to the specific user. The portal constitutes a single point of entry and a single logon to the services provided.