For the most part in Knowledge Management (KM), the chief knowledge officer’s (CKO) responsibilities are distillations of activities already addressed by senior management, but in an unfocused, often informal way. For example, typical CKO responsibilities include:
- Defining KM policy. Establishing employee policy regarding the documentation of work processes is one of several tasks that may be championed sporadically by senior management. However, the CKO is in a position to focus on the documentation process in detail and on an ongoing basis.
- Evangelizing Knowledge Management. Motivating employees to accept Knowledge Management by illustrating how it will benefit the company and the overall process of asset management.
- Coordinating education. A KM initiative involves education, assigning individual responsibility and a point person in each working group who is responsible for assuring compliance with the KM project and for updating information.
- Safeguarding information. As an information gatekeeper, the CKO is often in a position to determine access to information and the granularity of information to make available on a need-to-know basis. In here, most employees and managers need only limited access to the corporate information store.
- Employee-management liaison. In many companies, one of the CKO’s chief roles is to act as liaison between employees and management. By performing a function that solicits employee input, the CKO can often better encourage employees to go along with the KM project.
- Technologist. The CKO must be familiar with the available software and information tools to implement Knowledge Management in an organization. Although the CKO doesn’t necessarily need to be from the information technology world, he or she has to understand the tools in sufficient depth to estimate the overhead associated with their use.