Knowledge management, or KM, is a relatively old idea. It set off a flurry of activity and investment throughout the 1990s, culminating in “visionary” companies spending a lot of money with consultants and even creating a new executive role, the chief knowledge officer. When the Internet wave hit, despite some successes, KM in many ways went to the back burner, relegated to some hard-core types and domains like customer support where ROI was straightforward and tools were relatively mature.

However, a funny thing has happened on the way to obsolescence. KM is back and is even returning to the spotlight as more lightweight, more focused “KM 2.0” tools make it easier to use and justify new investments (see Modern Knowledge Management Applications). However, beyond innovation in technology, we also see new architectures, models and processes emerging, which are less about centralizing content and applying the arcane language of 1980s artificial intellience, and more about deploying intelligent search and navigation, connecting and locating experts, and leveraging ad hoc publishing models like blogs and RSS.

As seen in some of our recent research with ServiceXRG (more on that below) and the views of industry watchers like IDC and Gartner, enterprises have started to increase spending on knowledge management again, and expand its role both within customer service environments as well as more general business applications.

At the same time, with many employees increasingly using e-mail, text messaging and even blogs and wikis as a way to communicate and share information on a daily basis, knowledge is everywhere, creating a need for new KM solutions that not only facilitate sharing and reuse—but also work across new-age interaction channels and deal with both highly unstructured as well as structured information. How to choose and apply these solutions, and determine where to focus initial efforts, requires both a big-picture and detailed perspective.

Think Globally: Is It Time to Bring Back the CKO?
Identifying areas where KM may deliver value, driving user adoption and even spearheading development or integration of various tools requires both vision and awareness of the latest KM models and approaches. Plus, certainly, an awareness of the ways people currently do and wish to interact, and the ways the organization (and management) can support this without being heavy-handed.

In our view, this is a key rationale for revisiting and even bringing back the role of the CKO. In fact, in an article from 1999 in MIT Sloan Management Review (What Is a Chief Knowledge Officer?), the authors noted that CKOs have two complementary design competencies: being a technologist and also an “environmentalist” who can create social environments that stimulate informal sharing, and also develop events and processes to encourage more formal knowledge creation and exchange. We believe a successful CKO needs to be a proponent for KM as well as for the applications that leverage knowledge. The CKO must balance corporate strategy with the practical concerns, constraints and needs of business units, and in fact individual users. In other words, they must think globally, yet act locally.