The knowledge management responsibility includes both a push and a pull side. Knowing who has knowledge is no more important than knowing who needs knowledge - especially in these early times when corporate cultures are not yet naturally collaborative and knowledge seeking. Having the right knowledge means managing the organizational knowledge portfolio to anticipate emerging needs, satisfy current needs, and weed out the obsolete needs - everywhere in the organization. I prefer using the phrase knowledge portfolio management to knowledge management because it conveys this strategic distinction and separates itself from the territory staked out by information technology departments and vendors. That the CIO is confused about owning the CKO responsibility is a measure of how urgently this distinction needs to be made.
Knowledge management means having the right knowledge in the right place at the right time.
In late 1998 I had an opportunity to join a team assisting a multi-cultural global corporation define its knowledge management strategy and architecture. In preparation I searched for taxonomies and frameworks that might provide a working structure for us. Though I found many useful discussions of the issues and elements of knowledge management information technology systems and knowledge management practices, it was evident that the field is young, still struggling for definition, and still looking for a place of natural ownership within the corporation. In this search only two formal efforts stood out - one with substance and one with promise. The 1998 work by Holsapple and Joshi at the University of Kentucky is useful for its generic structural approach that stops short of arguable prescriptive methodology, and is an amalgamation of the thoughts and views of some 30 plus practitioners in the field.