For those of you out of the ANZ Region, RIMPA is the Records and Information Management Professionals Association. I'm a committee member in South Australia and occasionally contribute sessions at our quarterly meetings. Recently I had the real pleasure of running an executive engagement panel as a part of the yearly conference satellite event in Adelaide. I chose executive engagement because I believe it is one of the areas in which we as IRM professionals can significantly improve.
These were my lessons - https://innotecture.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/justifying_your_km_prog3.pdf - which overlap with many of the comments you make above.