Digital Employee Training With Digital Adoption Platforms Boost Learning and Knowledge Management of Corporate IT Systems

Due to increasing digitalization, employees need to use an increasing number of corporate IT systems. Digital Adoption Platforms (DAPs) recently address the resulting need for increased learning and skills to master such systems. Although of great practical importance, software adoption and learning literature has not yet studied the phenomenon of DAPs. Thus, after studying currently used DAPs (n=22 DAPs) we created our own DAP with interactive functionality based on this research. Subsequently we conducted an online experiment (n=152 employees) to assess if DAPs have positive training and learning effect on employees. More specifically, we compared the training and learning effects of using the DAP vs. using a classic user manual. The results of our ANOVA analyses show that employees using a DAP for learning will perceive a new corporate IT system as more useful than employees using a classic user manual for training. The use of DAPs significantly increases an employee's intention to use the new corporate IT system showing significant positive learning and training effects.