A cross-regional exploration of barriers to the adoption and use of electronic meeting systems

Electronic Meeting Systems (EMS) are intended to support group collaboration in completing tasks. While there have been many case studies and laboratory experiments on how EMS can support group tasks, large scale macro investigations exploring EMS adoption and use have been practically non-existent. Furthermore, while several barriers to EMS adoption and use have been suggested, their validation across organizations remains unexplored. We undertook a global initiative to explore information technology support for task-oriented collaboration in the US, Australia, Hong Kong, and Norway. In this paper, we focus specifically on assessing the adoption and use of EMS, and barriers to their adoption and use in organizations across the four regions. Our results suggest that EMS currently have limited adoption and are used infrequently across all the four regions. A further investigation into barriers to EMS adoption and use suggests that significant numbers of respondents do agree with a list of fourteen suggested barriers. However, while there is significant agreement between two countries (US & Australia) over how these barriers are ranked, there is no significant agreement between the remaining pairs of countries. Implications of our findings are discussed for practitioners and researchers.