Abstract:
Knowledge Management (KM) is an important consideration in e-Government portals to
ensure that knowledge flows efficiently between governments, individuals and organizations.
A crucial aspect of e-Government portals that has not been addressed adequately is the extent
to which KM have been implemented and identifying the direction to enhance e-Government
portal. Evaluation model known as KM model for e-Government with three KM broad
subsystems/mechanisms for portals: Knowledge Collection, Organization and Application
were employed. Each mechanism is characterized by a set of processes/categories and subcategories representing the KM features for supporting subsystems. Using this model,
evaluation checklist was developed based on analysis of the literature and best experience of
other countries e-Government portals and applied it, to seven ministry level organization eGovernment portals with the objective of investigating the extent to which KM mechanisms
have been implemented and identifies direction to enhance portals. Moreover, survey
questioner and interview guide was used. The research results indicate that on average, eGovernment portals featured (available and functional) about 55.92% of the KM
mechanisms. As a developing country and as a beginner to have government portals in
integrated form and lack for technology introduction in Ethiopia, the finding has shown good
performance, even though portals were not intentionally developed with the understanding of
KM. The evaluation also offered potential areas of improvement on the basis of the KM
model of e-Government. Based on the finding, the degree of application of ICT for KM
practice found to be low (43.06%). Surprisingly, the ICT contribution for KM practice in the
research entities showed up above average (55.1%), despite the fact that, it is less used in the
research entities. However, the finding confirmed that this contribution has less (39.08%) in
supporting for Ethiopian e-Government portal enhancement. Therefore, the researcher argues
that implementing KM is necessary to support the collection, organization and application of
knowledge between portals and their users to offer a single point of entry to multiple
government information and services. This study provides an insight into the situation of KM
processes in e-Government portals of Ethiopian ministries. This area requires further work, in
particular in elaborating the relationship between e-government and KM.
