A Taxonomy of KM and its Taxonomies

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.