Dave Pollard and I have been trading emails over the past few days over ideas growing out of my post on real world KM and how we can short circuit the maven/connector network to get straight to the heart of the beast in effecting some real let's get out of this slump changework in enterprise computing. We both agree that it's not the CTO or CIO who are going to do this, and I believe that's because, like Suzuki Roshi overflowing the Academic's cup, their mindset is already full, and let's face it, their own reputation is riding on the success of the current crop of failing KM already deployed.
Dave points out that it's not enough to allow your employees to gab on the intranet, and Gerry McGovern is absolutely correct (but for different reasons) when he says the best way to collapse your competition is to convince them to install an intranet.The closed circuit Iron Curtain microcosm is just a bad idea, it's stiffling, stagnant. The antidote is Bill Joy's observation of the expert you need never being on your payroll. Solutions, as Dave notes, happen in the networking between enterprises, in the rich biodiversity of the real world, and that's not going to happen behind a password-protected Zope server.
So how do we effect this paradigm change? Dave hits it right on in saying

we need to stop talking to CIOs and CKOs and even CFOs, and start talking about what this all means in layman's terms with CEOs. That means we need to get an audience with them

I've had this same problem all through my career: I've been selling real change for two decades, the unfortunate karma to be peddling whole new directions, and in my experience, only the CEOs still at the helm will dare mandate complete course corrections. The trick is gaining their audience. Once, when I'd mentioned how advertising on the web or in print was pointless for me, someone told me I should print my URL on golf-balls.
How do we get the ear of these Captains while gently ducking Proper Channels and Vested Decisions? Once we get their ear, how do we sell a CEO on this new social computing KM paradigm, on, as Dave calls it, "what is going on at the grassroots level in their own organizations."? David Weinberger et al are telling them that it's happening anyway and so they have to get with it, and Seth Godin is handing out all sorts of case studies where it works, so why are they not making the leap?
My simple answer is that it's still below their radar. How do we get it to blip on their screen? It has to appear in their 'blogspace', it has to percolate through their social knowledge networks.
What we need is a bridge into that bubble. We (editorial we, the knowitall industrial engineering guru consultants) did it once before, not long ago, maybe mid-1980's to the early 90's, when we proposed the blasphemy of JIT and TQM and a raft of other Japanese management imports which really said nothing more than that the person who is tied to the process 44 hours a week, 48 weeks of the year probably knows more about the practice than all the mounds of a thousand pundits' theories. The Great Secret of the booming Japanese economy of the late 80's was to "Go ask the workers" and the Great Secret to gaining the ear of the western Captains was the concurrent rise in Pacific Rim networking -- they'd meet their Asian counterparts, see the results in the Globe Report on Business, and over a golf game, they'd ask...
And this gets us right back to social networks in KM: How did we get them down to the shop floor when it was so painfully hard to get middle management to go down there? When western CEO's met with their wildly successful Japanese counterparts, that was the advice that kept surfacing. It was the consensus of their Google.
We need to get our CEOs thinking about where they spend their most productive time ... because we all know that this is the golf-course, the squash courts, the Club. To make the jump, we need to reframe social computing beyond teen fan-blogs, warblogers and gossip-lines. Oh, it's all those thing, yes absolutely ... and your CEO knows damn well that their country club is also all those things. That's the point.
Let's not kid ourselves, let's stop pretending we're so much more mystical and serious than we really are. CEO's laugh, they make bad jokes. But within all that is a stirring of trusts and reputations and knowledge exchange and business intelligence -- There are very good reasons why their country club is so effective; if it wasn't, then why spend so much money to belong?
Every CEO knows their country club is worth the ticket price because its the most economical way to forge strategic connections. It's the shortest path to gathering reliable business intelligence. It's pan-enterprise knowledge management and to sell the CEO, we only need to frame allowing open cross-enterprise social-networking as grassroots examples of the same country club dynamic, and then get this perception into the radar screens of the CEO world knowledge networks.