The Rise of the CXO
- Article 23 of 77
- Information Age, November 2001
In recent years, a new set of roles has emerged in the upper ranks of IT management
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Knowledge management
Another IT-related role that is gaining a great deal of traction is that of chief knowledge officer. “We see a lot of interest in knowledge management,” says Christian of Aveva Consulting. “It's not usually the size of the company that's important, but the complexity of the information management problem.”
The CKO is expected to work with the CIO to oversee “enterprise-wide knowledge management” and it is here that conflict can arise between the two positions. The implementation of knowledge management software systems, from companies such as Autonomy and Smartlogik, is one of the many ways CKOs try to bring the knowledge that is stored online to the rest of the enterprise. Building a corporate intranet is another example.
Giga Group analyst Daniel Rasmus suggests that, to avoid conflict, the CKO should report directly to the CEO. “If the position is integral on paper and in practice, the chief knowledge officer should report to the CEO. For companies that focus on knowledge, the chief knowledge officer's role is extremely important because it is not just operational. It is a role of transformation and also a core business process.”
But others disagree. According to Handby of CIO Connect, the trend for creating these additional roles “is more to do with having nice titles”, in his view. “The only real split I've seen in companies has been between IT strategy and IT operation responsibility, but the trend in recent years has been to get greater consistency by putting everything in the hands one person,” he says. So, while there tends to be only one CIO in a company – someone responsible for information management and IT – the “matrix of responsibility” below him or her is expanding, so that roles such as CKO, CPO or chief security officer are held by people who report to the CIO.
That said, there is a whole array of new IT-related positions emerging that are diluting the overall IT powerbase. As IT has become the linchpin of many other departments' operations, executives have emerged with titles such as director of e-enablement, head of e-procurement, director of customer insight, and e-marketing manager.
Despite their reservations, both Handby and Christian believe that the increase of titles, where it occurs, shows an increasing acknowledgement by those companies that technology has become critical to their competitiveness. “Organisations are embracing the idea that information management is an important aspect of the business,” says Christian. “There is an inevitable requirement to get things like privacy and security right, because information can be damaging to a business as well as being a resource.”
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