Who's in Charge?
Choosing the right leader for knowledge initiatives is a crucial first step

By Wayne Rash

When the concept of knowledge management was new, it was common for an advocate or two--often employees associated with information technology--to introduce it into the enterprise. But now, as ideas about knowledge energize business strategies, companies are giving more forethought to who should direct their KM efforts. The general result is a shift of responsibility for knowledge initiatives away from technologists to business executives or collaborative teams.

How should an enterprise decide who leads its KM initiatives? There appears to be no single right answer, although it is clear that the person(s) must be empowered to lead and be supported in their decisions. Observers agree, for example, that regardless of who heads it, a KM project should be sponsored at the highest level--by the chief executive officer or the board of directors. Further, any knowledge leader must possess some common capabilities. Whatever title appears on that person's business card, he or she must be able to

• build and maintain support from top executives

• have authority to command sufficient resources for the project's success

• take a strategic business perspective rather than a narrow departmental focus

• enlist broad acceptance and cooperation from employees

• avoid or nullify the negative impacts of corporate politics.

Research reveals several slots in the org chart where KM leadership often resides. One source of this information is a survey conducted by Knowledge Management and IDC of Framingham, Mass.; for details, see the sidebar "KM Leaders by Function."

In trying to assign KM responsibility for your organization, keep in mind corporate politics, which analysts see as the wild card in determining how an initiative should be designed and implemented and whether it will succeed. Some find it so important a variable that they argue for making the CEO the head of KM as a way to remove politics from the equation as much as possible.

Room at the top?
If rising above politics and competition for resources is the most important factor in deciding where authority for the knowledge management initiative should lie, the company CEO's office is the logical place. "You need to have the CEO be the champion," says Verna Allee, president of Integral Performance Group in Walnut Creek, Calif.

Although the attraction for this choice is obvious, piling the responsibility on an already burdened leader may not be practical. "It's easy to say that the CEO should be the leader, but there are a lot of details that the CEO can't attend to, so if you create a position, it should report directly to the CEO," Allee adds.

Mark W. McElroy, president of Macroinnovation Associates LLC in Windsor, Vt., envisions a similar reporting structure. He points out that "the CEO is responsible for strategy." Therefore, McElroy says, the executive handling knowledge management "should be independent of the CEO" to gather and provide the information and context on which corporate strategy is based.

In any case, getting the CEO involved from the beginning is crucial for success. "It makes a big difference if the CEO introduces KM into an organization," says Joe Firestone, chief knowledge officer of Executive Information Systems Inc. in Wilmington, Del. Firestone doubts that a CEO would have time to be the knowledge manager on a day-to-day basis. Rather, the CEO should appoint someone for that purpose and have that person report to him or her.

After ruling out the top boss for practical reasons, three primary candidates remain for the job of knowledge leader: the chief knowledge officer, the IS department and the cross-functional team. Here's a look at the pluses and minuses for each.

The CKO
The chief knowledge officer function has grown in direct response to knowledge management's popularity. But controversy exists even among KM consultants as to the necessity of this executive management position.

On the one hand, if your company has a CKO, that person will naturally assume knowledge leadership. "Knowledge should be managed by the CKO, who should be high in the organization," Firestone advises.

Carla O'Dell, president of the American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC) in Houston, takes the opposite view. "The CKO title is going away because it was faddish," she says. "Knowledge management is now being run by business leaders."

Allee of Integral Performance Group sees risk in creating this position. "If you name a CKO, knowledge gets narrowly defined," she says. "Companies should focus on knowledge as a strategic capability. This allows you to move fluidly between issues without encountering a turf war over and over again."

Although he advocates the position, Firestone sees trouble if the CKO is a new hire who has relatively few resources. "The CKO's authority is very limited" in such cases, he notes. He recommends creating a cross-functional committee to back up an underempowered CKO. "If you have a CKO chairing the committee and if the committee functions in a healthy way, you can use it to get a lot of buy-in for the KM solution," Firestone explains.

In the end, it may be more important to select someone who will succeed in the company's political environment than to appoint a person who really understands knowledge management. That profile requires both people skills and clout. "It matters less what the title and position happen to be than how closely that function reports to the board," says McElroy of Macroinnovation.

The IS group
Frequently the roots of KM are found in a company's information systems group. Whether responsibility should still reside there is a source of debate, usually shaped by whether one sees KM initiatives as technology- or business-based processes.

When an organization chooses to base knowledge management projects in the IS department, the senior knowledge executive (the CKO, for example) may report to the CIO. This structure assures technical support, but the risk is that non-IS employees will dismiss KM as a purely technical pursuit. "Knowledge management gets most narrowly defined when it is put under the CIO or the IS function," says Allee. "It becomes just a document management system, a best practices database or a portal."

According to Susan Hanley, executive director for enterprise collaboration and content management at Plural Inc. in Bethesda, Md., identifying knowledge management with IS can be a problem for some companies. "You get enamored with technology and forget about the process, but every solution is at best 20 percent technology," she says. "People think that the first thing you need is a place to work together online. Actually, you need a relationship and a business reason first."

But not everyone thinks it's a mistake to place KM responsibility in the technology establishment. "In terms of who is accountable or gets things done, it's not bad for the IS function to be in charge," says O'Dell of the APQC. "You've got to have a center of excellence somewhere, and if you don't have it in IS, you're going to struggle for IS budgets."

Even so, O'Dell stresses that knowledge management should not be left solely to IS. "If there's not a cross-functional steering committee, it will not be seen as a business solution," she adds.

The team
This category scored highest in the KMM/IDC survey, which bodes well for the spread of knowledge sharing across the enterprise, according to Brian McDonough, one of the IDC research managers who conducted the survey. "It means that the decision to go forward on a KM initiative is more beneficial to the whole company than if the CIO or HR manager does it," he says.

Other experts agree that such a group is strategically important to implementing knowledge management as a formal process. The value of the cross-functional team is that it avoids resistance to having any one part of the company in charge of knowledge management. To remain independent from domination by any single influence, the team must be sponsored at the highest level. Hanley of Plural notes that even a cross-functional team can be subject to organizational politics, but the backing of the CEO can help to reduce or eliminate that problem.

At the same time, the group must agree on the reason for managing knowledge in the first place and keep the organization focused on that objective. "Unless you're starting with a business objective, it doesn't matter who is sponsoring it, because it will fail anyway," Hanley says.

The right option
There is no universal answer to the question of who should lead KM. Nor should there be, because each company will encounter a unique set of circumstances when it faces the challenge of sharing and profiting from what it knows. "How these projects are managed depends on the corporate culture," says David Loshin, president of Knowledge Integrity Inc. in Silver Spring, Md. "Cooperative efforts sometimes fail because individuals compete for the rewards, making for less incentive to cooperate."

That knowledge management is increasingly seen as important is evident in the number of senior managers reported to head KM initiatives: More than 40 percent of knowledge management leaders in the KMM/IDC survey were "C level" officers (CEO, CFO, CIO or CKO). "Knowledge management is becoming more prominent in the minds of executives," says McDonough of IDC.

It's true that you won't get more out of an effort than you put into it. More and more companies are realizing that they have to turn some of their best and brightest to the critical task of managing knowledge.