Interpretive exploration of the technical knowledge repository sustainability: a case study in Malaysian government agency / Raja Faralita Raja Mohamad

Knowledge has been recognized as one of the most valuable assets in an organization. Managing, organizing and sustaining knowledge has become an important strategy by organizations for the purpose of gaining and maintaining their competitive advantages. Realizing how important knowledge need to be sustained in an organization, knowledge repositories (KR) is seen as one of the popular effort used by organizations as their knowledge sharing tools as well as an initiative for their knowledge management (KM) implementation as a whole. Despite the needs of KM implementation in the Malaysia public sector, yet the main problem occurs is to make the KM initiative visible and understandable at all levels of employees. This particular research was conducted in Malaysian public sector realizing that the Malaysian government is in the ongoing process of implementing Knowledge Management as a whole. However the main focal of this particular research was on the sustainability of KR and technical knowledge of the technical personnel. The study addresses four objectives; a) to explore the establishment of KR in ABC agency; b) to explore the sustainability of KR in ABC agency between active and non-active contributors; c) to study the engineer’s interpretation on the motivational elements that contribute to the KR sustainability; d) to investigate the constraints faced by engineers towards KR sustainability. A case study approach was adopted in conducting the research. A public sector agency chosen is among a few agencies which successfully implemented KM through utilizing KR. Hence, in-depth interview sessions were conducted among the engineers to understand the process involved in KR sustainability. The findings of the study show the elements that contributed to the sustainability of KR as well as motivation and constraint factors. This study perhaps will contribute to new empirical evidence on leveraging the use of KR in sustaining knowledge assets in public sector. On the other hand, it also acts as guidance for KM teams in respective agencies and ministries to improve their KM initiative as well as minimizing barriers that setting back the whole process of KM implementation. Therefore, it is aim that the findings from this study are able to facilitate the Malaysian government in finding ways towards achieving the overall KM implementation in future.