Employee Portals based on Knowledge Management in Public Education: An Empirical Study about Implementation Barriers in Spain

Theoretical Foundations

A classic definition of employee portal conceptualized it as a single point of access to all services that an organization provides to its employees (Polgar, Bram & Polgar, 2006). Other studies focused on the characteristics of those services, defining those portals as web-based interfaces to access personalized information, resources, applications, and e-commerce options with which employees can access a range of internal and external sources through a network connection in a password-protected setting (Sugianto &Tojib, 2006). Whether the researchers unify those points of view, could conclude that an employee portal is a secure single point of access to all internal and external services and information provided online by the administration to its personnel.

Knowledge management is a key factor for any organization (He, Quiao & Wei, 2009; Farzin, Kahreh, Hesan & Khalouei, 2014). Specifically, education sector is conceptualized as a knowledge industry (Mishra, Henriksen, Boltz & Richardson, 2016). Knowledge management through governments’ educational employee portals focuses on the acquisition and improvement of teacher skills (Pérez, 2013) and the creation and maintenance of an educational repository (Vélez-Rivera, Rodríguez-Martínez, Díaz, Núñez-Molina & Rivera-Vega, 2010). The integration of knowledge and e-learning has been modeled previously in the scientific literature (Maier & Schmidt, 2007; Judrups, 2015). Although criticism about the overemphasis on IT of most of knowledge management efforts in all kind of organizations (Ale, Toledo, Chiotti & Galli, 2014) the technology seems to be necessary for its implementation (Harris, 2006). An employee portal is a good way to improve the skills of teachers (Draganidis & Mentzas, 2010; Alsabawy, Cater-Steel & Soar, 2013). In this line, the uses of technologies that can create collaborative networks generate a training environment based on sharing experiences and an open space for criticism and reflection on own and others’ practices (Chen, 2014).