Remember when Knowledge Management was new and sexy, about ten years
ago?  This professor
of information management does; barely five years ago he wrote
about 20 CKO’s in the Sloan Business School magazine, and now few of
those positions still exist.  What went wrong, if anything?

First, he posits that KM has gone through a few stages, from an initial
exalted position as a strategic resource (a "source of innovation"),
to an ill-defined middle period where a grab-bag of tools were employed
(some amounting to old training wine in new KM bottles), to the last,
perhaps current, era of intranets, portals, and search.  Yet to
this day, defining what KM actually is—or even what "knowledge"
actually is—remains elusive.

Given this chequered history, our professor adopts a pragmatic approach.  Rather
than trying to distill the metaphysical essence of KM, he claims to
have empirically categorized seven species of KM, each best-suited
to its own ecological business niche:

• "Systems:"  Knowledge is codified in databases (Xerox
  uses this for its maintenance workers)
• "Cartogarphic:"  Directories and maps guide the
  inquisitive to experts (Bain’s "People Finder")
• "Engineering:"  Exposing users to processes (HP’s
  product and competitive information databases)
• "Commercial:"  Identifying a company’s patents and
  other IP assets in an effort to maximize profitability (Dow Chemical,
  IBM)
• "Organizational:"  Attempting to put people with
  similar interests in touch through formal and informal knowledge
  networks (Shell, BP)
• "Spatial:"  Kind of like "organizational" only relying
  more on physical architecture of offices than IT (British Airways’
  new headquarters, any self-respecting ad agency), and
• "Strategic" (yes, again):  Where the organization
  conceives of itself as in the business of creating and selling knowledge
  (Johnson + Johnson, Unilever, any self-respecting law firm)

So where does this taxonomy leave us? 

The helpful part is that our good professor has provided a framework
for thinking about which way(s) of deploying KM are best suited to the
way lawyers already work.  Adapting KM to lawyers works far
better than the converse.  The main part of the message, however,
may be that the best KM deployments are the ones that become invisible.  If
we conceive of KM as analogous to professional ethics or quality control,
the lightbulb goes on:  Everyone, and no one, is responsible.  Maybe
that’s why those 20 CKO’s are no longer around:  Not that they
failed, but they succeeded.