EBTAM: technology acceptance in e-Business environments

e-Business organizations must frequently face changes in their systems to stay competitive. However, it is not guaranteed the new systems will be acceptable for the workers. The e-Business Technology Acceptance Model (EBTAM) model is proposed in this paper as a way to study acceptance before actual deployment of a new system. This model takes into account other models reported in the literature, but it is essentially oriented towards small and medium-sized organizations, which usually have limited human and economic resources. The model was used in three companies, and the evaluation instrument was applied at three stages of a system replacement process: (1) before the new system was deployed, in order to capture the independent variables, (2) after 1.5 months of use, and (3) after 9 months of use. Unlike most models reported in the literature, EBTAM shows reasonable predictions about technology acceptance without requiring expert evaluators or many users experienced using the system under evaluation. This fact makes EBTAM easier to implement and use than others evaluation methods, which is particularly important in small organizations given their relatively scarce resources and expertise for this type of evaluations.