It is about the concepts, not the name

I attended a faculty meeting at one of the places I teach at and was most surprised to learn that the entire MSc Knowledge Management course will be renamed to something along the lines of organisational development and learning organisation. Let me quote the head of department responsible for the course:

"Ever since I started in KM, it looked like the breakthrough of KM might just be 3 or 4 years away. Now this is a couple of years ago and it still looks like the breakthrough of KM is still 3 or 4 years away... We constantly have a lot of explaining to do for potential students as well as to industry partners as to what KM actually means and once we have explained this to them, we are fine, but this is a too big initial hurdle ... The contents of the course wont change substantially but the name will."

I think she has a good point there. The only industries I personally know of that not only "do KM", but also call it KM, are the legal and the pharmaceutical sector. This does not change the fact that a lot of organisations do stuff that most people would actually consider KM (provided they have heard the term). I had a look at the job titles of people I know who "do KM" and here is a selection of some titles/descriptions I found: Online Services Manager, Business Development Consultant, Information Manager, Research Manager, Special Counsel, Client Focus Manager, Strategy Analyst plus a high number of consultants, PSLs, librarians and academics who do research and/or consultancy in the field. Yet very few are actually called "Knowledge Manager", "Head of KM" or similar.

The trouble is, I kind of like the term KM and I still think that the term information management is too vulnerable to be hijacked by too technically oriented people. I have been ranting about this for a while now and I have not come to a useful conclusion, while the problem for those studying KM or looking to start a KM career remains the same: the jobs and the tasks are there, but it continues to be difficult to find them because they are called so many different names.

And for those of you who haven't heard about this yet: Microsoft is entering the KM arena. There are interesting comments on the subject by Tom Baldwin and Jack Vinson as well as a presentation on microsoft.com on how this will work. As far as I understand, this basically means a shared taxonomy across all MS applications and servers that can be full text searched and used to locate experts and connect people. There is not much to add to Tom Baldwin's final sentence in his posting: "I'm sure this tool will need a lot of work to truly help mine experience and expertise within a law firm, but it's good to see Microsoft enter the KM arena."
So, can we consider Microsoft boarding the KM train a breakthrough or not?