Investigating factors affecting knowledge management practices in public sectors

Abstract

Knowledge Management (KM) is a systematic approach in creating, sharing, using and managing information effectively sustain knowledge regardless public or private organizations. It helps organizations to make better decision making in order to achieve the goals and increase the productivity. However, many public organizations are still facing challenges to adopt knowledge management practices compared to private organization due to lack of awareness. They are not aware of the influenced factors such as people, process, and technology. Therefore, this paper identifies influencing factors that contributed to the successful KM practices in public sectors. This study employs quantitative approaches by distributing a set of questionnaires to 83 IT practitioners in public organizations. 63 returned responses were analyzed using the Rasch Measurement Model. The findings indicated that there is a lack of participation amongst the staff in practicing efficient knowledge management due to they are still not ready to accept changes to the new system, lack of exposure and behavior. In addition, looking at critical success factor such as on the human resources (HR), there is a lack of encouragement such as rewards and recognition given to employees who practices KM in the organization. As a result, this paper highlights the most influential factors for effective knowledge management practices in terms of people, process and technology. We hope that the results can be used as a guideline to rectify the challenges in KM practices especially in the public organizations.