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Many IS researchers have long investigated ways to measure IS success (Delone & McLean, 1992). System quality (Srinivasan, 1985), information quality (Mahmood & Medewitz, 1985), system use (King & Rodriguez, 1981), individual impact (Bergeron, 1986), organizational impact (Benbasat & Dexter, 1986), return on investment (Delone, 1988) and user satisfaction (Baroudi & Orlikowsky, 1988) are several success measures that have been commonly proposed in the past literature. Each of these measures has their own advantages and disadvantages; some are more relevant to particular organizations than the others and thus making it more difficult to conclude which the best success measure is for IS implementations. Nevertheless, IS researchers seem to agree that user satisfaction is the most extensively utilized surrogate measure of IS success (Au, Ngai, & Cheng, 2002). In addition to its applicability and ease of use, Delone and McLean (1992) suggest that the popularity of user satisfaction measures are due to their high degree of face validity, the availability of reliable tools for measuring satisfaction, and the fact that other proposed measures are still conceptually weak or empirically difficult to obtain.
User satisfaction assesses whether the needs of system users are being satisfied and hence most user satisfaction measures capture the perceptions of system users toward the information quality and system quality attributes (Doll, Deng, Raghunathan, Torkzadeh, & Xia, 2004). Previous research including Ein-Dor and Segev (1978) and Hamilton and Chervany (1981) found that user satisfaction is most appropriate when a specific system was evaluated. Consequently, a large number of user satisfaction measures for particular types of IT applications, such as Executive Information Systems (Benard & Satir, 1993), Electronic Data Interchange (Jones & Beatty, 2001), Enterprise Resource Planning (Calisir & Calisir, 2004), Knowledge Management Systems (Ong & Lai, 2004), and websites (Muylle, Moenaert, & Despontin, 2004) have been developed.
This paper focuses on one most recent user satisfaction scale specifically developed for the employee portal environment, namely the Business-to-Employee portal user satisfaction (B2EPUS) scale (Tojib, Sugianto, & Sendjaya, 2008). This scale was developed to respond to the call for an adequate theoretical framework to guide organizations in determining the extent to which their portal implementations are successful. A rigorous multi-stage process of scale development employed in the original study had sufficiently demonstrated the reliability and validity of the B2EPUS scale (see Tojib et al., 2008 for details). In the attempt to extend the generalizability of the B2EPUS scale, this study aims to further examine the stability of structure and dimensionality of the construct, as well as to assess the reliability and validity of the scale. In this paper, we focused on testing the scale on portal users of African employee systems.