Certainly KM isn’t a cure for ALL ills, right?<

Well...if you consider that the departments you mentioned are all staffed by knowledge workers, and define improvement as a function of reducing time to perform an operation, reducing the cost of completing an operation, or improving the quality of the result of an operation, then I would submit that achieving any improvement must necessarily involve some sort of knowledge-based change.

Long gone are the days of managing hoards of unskilled laborers who mindlessly use backs and muscles to achieve an outcome.

Conclusion: all work is knowledge work. Ergo, the assertion in my previous post. If you focus on improving work outcomes, you will inevitably find yourself doing KM work of some sort. So, yeah, a cure for all ills, if you wish to think of it that way.