New Agora

Knowledge Management staff often suffer from being marginalised in organisations. In most cases, this is probably not intentional or malicious. However, it's a common consequence of KM staff being placed in areas without strategic clout (eg the corporate library) or where the strategic focus of the area is elsewhere (eg HR, ICT). In 2008, Patrick Lambe provided some details about the "brutish" consequences of this marginalisation.

As a result, there has been renewed interest by the KM community in organisations establishing Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO) positions to ensure that KM thinking gets included at the strategic level.

Most prominantly, there was recently a push by the FedKM group to put a proposal for the establishment of a KM Center including a Chief Knowledge Officer within the US government. Although a number of models were discussed, it appeared likely that any such Center wouldn't have a prescriptive role but would focus on providing support for KM programs in departments and tacitly demonstrate buy-in and approval for these programs at the highest level of government.

The idea met with some fairly vocal opposition from a number of sources, most notably Dave Snowden who has been consistently anti-centralisation of the KM function. Calling the whole idea of a KM Center "a recipe for disaster", Dave said in May:

[In KM we] are dealing with fragmented, self assembling systems where the role of leadership is to manage constraints, not direct or consolidate activity in one place. It's not bottom up or top down, or even middle-bottom up, it's about managing nodal networks and the techniques for that are the antithesis of "Centres".

On a recent post on ActKM (requires registration), Dave said:

Historically the KM role was provided by Librarians, Line Managers, Training Officers, etc. etc.

I'm not sure that the [appointment] of knowledge managers and CKOs has shown any evidence of improving over those older models. I don't see many CKO posts these days, and few of the original ones stand.

My view, which I think I can show I have held consistently for a decade or so, is that the only full time KM people should be in pure support roles (Librarians etc.) and the KM function itself should be distributed into line management, part time with a network based co-ordination function reporting to Strategy.

Given this history, it is interesting that in a recent blog post Dave provides details about a proposal for a CKO function during a current consulting stint. In summary, his suggested arrangements are:

• Assign the CKO role on a rotating, part time basis to a senior member of staff. Suggested assignment is up to 50% of their time for a minimum period of six months
• One month overlap period as each successor starts
• Dedicated team of support staff to provide continuity of policy and execution and liaison with other business areas
• Each organisational unit to have a middle manager with part time responsibility for KM linked to the central function, possibly with their own support staff if the OU is large enough
• An panel of KM experts to be appointed to provide ongoing guidance and specifically to attend a 2-3 day session at the time of each handover. At that session, the panel would provide a report to the CEO with a review of past activity and suggestions for future activity

In a comment I posted to Dave's blog (which is still in moderation), I asked whether Dave considered this to be a partial reversal of his anti-centralisation stance. Even though the CKO function is rotating rather than permanent, his proposal still provides for a central KM area with a permanent presence, and KM panel of experts providing top-down guidance on activities.

While I could never justify this level of overhead in the small/medium companies & departments that I have worked for, it is a very interesting model. Some other questions that sprang to mind which I posed to Dave are:

• How would the role of the CKO be discharged in practice? Since the person is appointed from the senior management team, the assumption is that they won't be KM experts. I believe this would make them closer to a government Minister (Australian or UK - don't know about elsewhere) where they take advice from the permanent staff.
• Would the 50% of their time that they normally devote elsewhere be backfilled by another staff member? Or would they be expected to fulfil the CKO role in addition to "their real job"?
• How would this arrangement avoid the ghetto-isation of the dedicated KM staff since they would have no business-as-usual links with the rest of the organisation? The danger would be that as the central CKO office came under pressure to prove its worth in the next financial squeeze, it would start to demand reports and measures of activity which could quickly become resented as an overhead.

None of these questions seem unsurmountable, but I would be interested to hear how Dave imagines they could best be avoided or resolved.

UPDATE: Dave promises to respond to these and other questions in a future post.