Evaluating and Enhancing Ethiopian e-Government Portal Functionality in Knowledge Management Perspective

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.