The Malaysian Ministry of Education wanted to improve Malaysia’s higher education system and turn Malaysia into a country known for its excellent higher education especially in the South East Asian region. The Ministry identified Knowledge Management (KM) as one of the key requirements to achieve its goal.

The main theme of this study was to identify the core component of Knowledge Management. The study concluded that the main areas of KM includes the creation/generation of knowledge by faculty and students, the sources or channels that they use to acquire knowledge, the process of storing the acquired knowledge, and finally the dissemination or sharing of the knowledge in their respective universities. Furthermore, the Ministry also wanted to find out the level of the aforementioned practices in Malaysian Universities. The second stage of this study was to identify and analyze the social and technical aspects of knowledge management. The technical aspects are as follows:

Infrastructure: This deals with the technical component of KM such as software and hardware.

Info-culture: Which deals with predominant attitudes and behaviour whereby a set of rules and guidance are established for members of a group or an organization to follow.

Info-structure: This deals with people’s views and reactions towards different organizational infrastructures such as IT, infrastructure policy, and organizational hierarchy.

The last part of this process was to analyze the different factors that affect the implication of Knowledge Management.

In order to accumulate data for their study, the Ministry formulated a survey and had eight universities participate in it. The Ministry used different statistical techniques e.g. descriptive analysis, factor analysis, and multiple regressions in order to analyse the data. After analysing the data, the Ministry found that the participant universities have a high level of KM practices; such that the students and faculties generate knowledge through class discussion, discussion with peers, observation, and experimentation. They acquired knowledge through researches, the internet, intranets, conferences, bulletin boards, and workshops. The knowledge acquired was stored as both hard and soft copies, and was also properly filed in databases. Finally, they shared their knowledge extensively through publications, conferences, workshops, dialogues, forums, informal discussions, teaching and trainings, and consultancies. Based on the survey, the Ministry concluded that the first four components of KM did not need any readjustments or new implementations because the results from the survey were satisfactory.

After analyzing the data for social and technical components of KM, the Ministry found out that most of the participants were satisfied with organizational culture and structure but some of the participants were moderately satisfy with IT infrastructure such as IT maintenance, data security, and adequate IT support. Based on these findings, the Ministry found out that the socio-technical components were the key factors in enhancing the performance of the universities. Thus the implementation of an IT infrastructure or knowledge management system which utilized human capital with best practice and procedures was found to be the most efficient way of enhancing the performance of the universities.