Evaluating e-government has proven difficult. Reasons include the complex nature of e-government, difficulties in measuring outcomes and impact, and the evolving nature of the phenomenon itself. Practical and effective evaluation methods would be useful to guide the development. To gauge the state of the art in the field, a review of contemporary literature investigated the status of research on e-government evaluation. We found the issues involved to be described by five critical factors: maturity levels, evaluation object, type of indicators, evaluation timing, and stakeholder involvement. The review suggests that there is no best model but rather that e-government evaluation must be situated and take a formative approach to guide the next step. However in doing so there is a need for a clear perspective on where e-government development is going. On this point research is more in agreement, and we provide a model to conceptualize this development.