Blurred Chief Knowledge Officers’ professional identity
Abstract: Knowledge management is increasingly under attack to show returns on investments and profitable business outcomes. While many companies retain their executive leadership as chief knowledge officers (CKOs) and vice presidents of knowledge management, the trend toward appointing CKOs that developed in the late 1990’s has been reversed at many companies and a new trend is to assign the strategic functions of knowledge management to the chief information officer (CIO). This new strategic approach has many ramifications that determine if the firm will be able to meet not only short-term objectives but firm mission strategic outcomes as well. This paper researches over 100 knowledge management executives respondents in a broad cross-section of medium and large US industries and organizations to question why the shift is occurring and what the strategic basis is for this shift? The results of this study clearly show that there are pros and cons to make this strategic shift and that many firms are doing so with little actual factual knowledge of the strategic effects on performance or intellectual capital formation. This paper and empirical firm performance and patent research is designed to give that top manager (CEO) the appropriate information to make rational decisions based on facts when considering eliminating or consolidation of CKO into the CIO function. Decisions on CLO and CKO positions should be based on the firm related performance in both measurable intellectual property and financial results. The results are presented and summarized and the statistical methodology of regression and correlation are used in this paper.
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Keywords: Professional identity, knowledge management, chief knowledge officer, CKO, KM leaders
Nakash, M. (2024). “A profession that is a story”: blurred professional identity of CKO’s. Knowledge Management Research & Practice, 1-11.
(cc) BY-NC-ND 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Published on behalf of the Operational Research Society
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