Mary Lee Kennedy, Director of Knowledge Network Group at Microsoft, gave a presentation on The CKO Summit - "An Inside View from the Summit," which was in October 2003.
The focus of the Summit this year was on developing a way to talk about knowledge management projects in terms that business decision-makers would understand, with the goal of clearly identifying why knowledge management matters.
The meat of the discussion came right at the end of the hour. At the Summit they developed a framework which is intended to help knowledge professionals* think about the strategy of the organization and how "KM" fits into the strategy. From there, this should help the organizations make decisions about what tactics to employ that make sense for that strategy. The audience for this framework is the internal KM leaders who will be developing the KM tactics for the organization.
As part of this, the Summit divided industries into three categories, based on The Discipline of Market Leaders: Chose Your Customers, Narrow Your Focus, Dominate Your Market: Companies whose primary focus is Operational Excellence, Customer Intimacy, or Product Leadership. They also divided the general KM application space into applications that support Expertise, Information or Ideas. Then, they have a mapping of the company types into the general types of application-support those companies will need in each of these three areas.
Customer Intimacy organizations typically need training and coaching from the Expertise space; customer relationship management, external knowledge sharing, and best practices tools from the Information space; and after action reviews from the Ideas space.
Product Leadership organizations typically need portfolio management from the Expertise space; internal and external knowledge sharing and decision management in the Information space; and development of innovation cultures in the Idea space.
Finally, Operational Excellence organizations typically need support for continuous improvement under Expertise; benchmarking in the Information realm; and an innovation approach to getting things done in the Ideas space.
In other words, depending on the focus of the organization, it will need different KM approaches. Seems almost too obvious, but this is the first time I have seen people acknowledge this and make an attempt to create a framework to help facilitate discussion of KM's value to the enterprise.
Check the TFPL link to the CKO Summit above for the upcoming report.
* Knowledge professionals are the people building (and selling) KM within their companies.