Where is that Chief Knowledge Officer?

The downturn of the past few years has caused a lot of reexamination of the bold assumptions of the 1990s. Recently, Nicholas Carr proclaimed “IT Doesn’t Matter” in May’s Harvard Business review, providing countless responses both with him and against him. Has the Knowledge Officer gone the way of Carr’s IT? Lester Thurow, in "Fortune Favors the Bold," argues that a Chief Knowledge Officer could have saved Kmart. If true it would certainly be worthwhile for companies to examine their own efforts at knowledge management. However, Thurow is probably wrong for two reasons.

The Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO) was popularized in the 1990s when all of the consulting firms touted their own CKO and how companies needed knowledge management to give their company the competitive edge. Not surprisingly the consulting company was there to help and somewhat surprisingly the customer company was willing to pay: often at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars per consultant per year. Many hired the consulting firms to create “frameworks” to capture and guide knowledge within the company. The CKO runs that framework, modifying it as necessary. This is the generally accepted definition of a CKO. Thurow uses a broader definition that incorporates, for want of a better term, Chief Strategist. He uses Bill Gates at Microsoft as his example of a successful CKO. Bill Gates is not a CKO – but he does make the concept of a CKO and knowledge management work at Microsoft. The difference is a subtle but important one. Bill Gates is the consumer of knowledge management at Microsoft and he mandates that it is a respected discipline—even if he never uses the words “knowledge management.”

The acceptability that knowledge and people are important is nearly universal. Most companies utter the mantra of “people are our biggest asset” – whether they mean it or not. No doubt these words were uttered at Kmart headquarters. One can agree with Thurow’s reasoning that Kmart failed to understand the changing market dynamics vis-à-vis a WalMart. Would a CKO – by traditional definition – have made a difference? No, because there was not a culture of accepting and leveraging a dynamic framework of knowledge management. You could have stuck Bill Gates into Kmart and made him CKO and the exact same thing would have happened.

The need for a CKO has not disappeared. Companies need them more now than ever before. Pressures on productivity continue as companies timidly test the waters of recovery. As a recovery becomes a reality, employees will start to test the waters of the job market—taking valuable knowledge with them.

The issue is not whether or not companies need a CKO, but that they still do not know what one is, or how to use one effectively. A properly defined CKO, with the organization’s full backing, can make a difference. Anything else is nearly irrelevant.