Abstract: The government’s aspirations of making
Malaysia a leading international educational centre in the Asian Region has put
a strong pressure on local universities to improve the quality of education
they offer. One of the major steps that has been identified by the government
to achieve this goal is to enhance the performance of local universities
through the application and implementation of an excellent knowledge management
(KM) system. An effective KM system requires every academician to practice
appropriate management of knowledge in his or her teaching and learning
activities, which includes, generating, acquiring, storing and disseminating
knowledge effectively to users of knowledge, especially students. A study by
the Centre for Academic Development (CADe) of Universiti Putra Malaysia in 2005
found that the level of knowledge management practices in Malaysian
universities was merely moderate; and to meet the national aspirations, KM
practices need to be developed further from various aspects of structure,
facilities and culture among the academic players. The ive of this study
is to evaluate the level of practice among the academicians and to determine factors
contributing to the effectiveness of knowledge management practices at
individual, faculty and university level. Eight local universities, both public
and private participated in the study. Factor Analysis was used to determine
factors affecting the practices of knowledge management while Multiple
Regression Analysis was used to analyse and determine the importance of various
variables that will add value, thus improve the performance of Malaysian
universities. The results indicate that info-structure support; infrastructure
capacity; info-culture; and knowledge acquisition, generation, storage and
dissemination; are important factors in shaping the KM initiatives.
Info-structure is found to be the most significant variable. This is consistent
with other studies, which confirm that people and cultural issues are the most
difficult problems to resolve, but tend to produce the greatest benefits.

Keywords: Organisational knowledge, knowledge
management practices, infrastructure, info-structure, info-culture.

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