Information Needs of the Public Manufacturing Enterprises in Ethiopia

No Thumbnail Available

Date

1992-06

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Addis Ababa University

Abstract

with an overall objective of identifying the information needs and problems of the public manufacturing sub-sector and proposing recommendations for the development of the national industrial information systems and services, a questionnaire survey was made on 34 enterprises and their employees and a total of 159 completed questionnaire were collected and analyzed. Assessments were made on the general features of the manufacturing sector, industrial techn~logy transfer and R&D ~ activities, and the existing industrial information sources, systems and services based on the literature on the subjects and interviews. Most of the enterprises (91%) do not have any organised information unit nor do they have concrete plans and programmes to establish such a unit in the near future. But the majority of the respondents (81%) believe their firms need their own information units and they think the major factor for the absence such units in the enterprises was lack of management awareness than shortage of the required resources. The major areas of information need were production, technical and marketing in that sequence. Though the enterprises were depending on various external information sources for the needed information, the dependence on library/information centres is very low compared to other sources mainly because neither the collection of their information centres nor their services could meet their requirements. In order to address the identified problems and needs, and to improve the industrial information systems and services, measures needed to be taken at the levels of the Ministry of Industry, industry- groups and enterprises are suggested~ -

Description

Keywords

Information Needs, Public Manufacturing

Citation