Enter the Chief Knowledge Officer

Training & Development, Feb, 2000 by Dede Bonner

The new masters of the universe: how to hire one, how to be one.

Have you ever spent weeks working for a solution, only to discover that the same problem has been solved elsewhere in your organization? Or perhaps your search for vital information is frustrated when you learn that the most expert employee on the topic left the company last year. Or maybe your HR department is searching for ways to better align their databases of employees' skills with internal job vacancies.

Those are just three examples of the wake-up call in organizations to manage their knowledge resources and knowledge workers better.

We're well into the knowledge era, in which there's an explosion of easy access to information via the Internet and elsewhere, assisted by powerful databases. As never before, senior managers are realizing that the success factors for aggressive business growth in today's highly competitive marketplace are what their employees know and how capable they are at learning the newest solutions and technologies. In this knowledge era, an organization's intangible assets-employees' collective intelligence of skills, experience, and work ethic-is crucial to business advantage and accelerated growth. Recent surveys by the Conference Board and the American Management Association show that at least one half of U.S. companies and up to 72 percent of overseas firms have some kind of knowledge management initiative planned or underway.

Knowledge management isn't new, and its basic premises are simple. Employees hold a wealth of knowledge about their companies, including the products, customers, internal processes, histories, technologies, and competitors. But that knowledge is usually scattered across people and locations. Likewise, learning usually happens at an individual level as a one-time event, without an organizational context or sense of continuity. For that reason, some pioneers in the field of knowledge management are predicting a blending of KM with organizational learning as the two areas mature. Once a firm has a grip on what knowledge it has and how to manage it, then it will be able to more effectively assess its organizational learning capabilities, maximize learning at the individual level, and use knowledge capture and sharing as ways to enhance organization-wide learning.

Knowledge doesn't happen in a vacuum. It's all about relationships and trust--people's willingness to share what they know for the greater good of a group. It takes a culture that encourages a free-flowing exchange of ideas. That makes knowledge--the stuff between people's ears -- different from information and data, which are merely raw material without proven value. In order for people to be willing to capture, share, and retain their hard-earned knowledge, organizations must have environments and leadership that foster cultures of continuous learning and support the integration of internal business functions.

Enter the newest fast-track careers in the business: chief knowledge officer and chief learning officer. CKOs and CLOs, whether an official title or in duty only, are the leaders of their organizations' knowledge management and organizational learning initiatives. In many large companies and a few small ones, CEOs are creating those new senior-level positions as their strategic partners in order to initiate, drive, and integrate their firms' organizational learning and knowledge management efforts. Other positions along these lines include knowledge manager and learning architect. CKOs and CLOs are earning US$81,000 to $750,000, according to industry sources, with estimates of million-dollar figures on the horizon at the largest companies. Salaries for CKO and CLO positions are about the same, depending on the size of company, type of industry, and job complexity.

Knowledge Management in Practice: Chief Knowledge Officers and Chief-Learning Officers (ASTD, 2000) is a series of case studies at 18 global organizations representing a wide diversity of industries, including technology, health care, consulting services, retail, financial, education, government, accounting, and insurance. The cases define initial best practices and lessons learned, and provide guidance for people aspiring to be knowledge or learning leaders.

What CKOs and CLOs do

Most chief knowledge officers and chief learning officers are first-generation incumbents. They typically started their jobs less than three years ago and did so without clearly defined roles, responsibilities, and daily activities. Those are a work in progress. The case studies date only from the early 1990s.

Chief knowledge officer positions are typically created to leverage knowledge into tangible business benefits. Likewise, CLO positions are designed to leverage learning. The culture of an organization, the type of knowledge and learning it wants to emphasize, and how technologically focused it is are pivotal factors in choosing one position over the other.

CKOs locate knowledge within a company and find ways to capture, distribute, and create more of it. In some of the cases, the CKO position originated from that of chief information officer, which is primarily technology-driven. But a CKO is more likely to view technology as only an enabler for an effective knowledge management system, and he or she brings the added dimensions of strategic vision and business savvy.