It’s my guess that Mike Cooke’s provocative article in the February 15, 2012 issue of Financial Times (“Does the company CIO have a future?”) has a lot of people thinking about their career choices.
And while there’s probably not a lot of worrying among CIOs secure in their jobs, people aiming to move up the IT ladder will read what Cooke has to say with great interest.
Cooke, a partner in Booz & Company’s Strategy and IT practices, begins his good story by noting that “the rapid change in both technology and the information technology (IT) function over the last 50 years” has enabled the “continued metamorphosis” of the CIO role. He is not, it seems, so sure that happy state will continue, and he suggests several reasons why.
During the last 12 years, Cooke points out, we’ve seen the dot-com bubble burst, the “great” recession, outsourcing on the global scale, and the development of technologies that don’t require an IT department. With this last, Cooke gives attention to several specifics (“cloud services, software as a service, and even the proliferation of smart phones and mobile devices”), all impressive in their ability to strengthen the knowledge development and knowledge sharing process – KD/KS. The picture Cooke paints is pretty clear, and the reader comes away with the idea that, generally speaking, enterprise-wide information and knowledge sharing is getting better all the time. But if corporate success depends on how well the KD/KS process is managed (as it does), there are challenges. More and more attention will be required for those many and various “elements” of the information- and knowledge-sharing process, and the question then becomes: is this the work of the CIO?
Probably not, except in several key ways which Cooke is fair to identify and make some projections about. Linked to those roles for the CIO-like employee, though, is a goodly set of trends about what’s going on. No need to list them here (Cooke does a good job) but they are the technology and information/knowledge integration trends we talk about a lot. We see them all the time, and we talk about how – as we notice them – the “IT-as-pipeline-and-KM-as-what-flows-through” dichotomy of the past is making less and less sense in more and more organizations. And what these trends tell us is that – within the corporate knowledge culture – we’re creating a KD/KS environment in which synthesis, analysis, and even interpretation all play a critical role in how knowledge is developed and then shared as sharing is required. No longer are information, knowledge, and strategic learning the purview of one or another “slice” or “silo” of the enterprise. It is connected to everything that everybody does, and it all comes together to make the company successful.
Cooke sees two roles for the former-CIO of the future, and he sees them as two different jobs, one “focused on strategic information needs of the company” and the other managing the company’s information technology. The role of the former, whom Cooke characterizes as the Chief Strategic Information Officer (CSIO) comes very close to what others of us are referring to as the knowledge strategist (with the company’s thought leader in the C-suite as the company’s Chief Knowledge Strategist). And the similarity between the CSIO and the CKS becomes even clearer when we look at how Cooke describes the CSIO’s work:
…the wealth of information companies will deal with (and it could be argued, deal with today) is considerable. In fact, it offers so much potential value that it warrants a complete focus on understanding and extracting that potential. The role of a CSIO could not be executed to its maximum if that person was distracted by regularly occurring delivery issues and problems that today’s CIO typically deals with. In short, the sheer value of strategic information demands complete focus.
It’s that “complete focus” that defines the knowledge strategist we seek for the workplace. Thanks to the valuable thinking of people like Mike Cooke, we’re a lot closer to closing the IT/KM divide than ever before. Whether we call the people we put in charge of information management, KM, and strategic learning our “Chief Strategic Information Officer” or our “Chief Knowledge Strategist” is probably irrelevant. It’s their work that is the knowledge work of the future.
At the Braintrust Knowledge Management LinkedIn Group, Mike Jewsbury comments:
This will be interesting to watch. I feel that I hear more CIOs moving around lately than CEOs. And I personally wouldn’t mind a rise in CKO/CKSs.
Also at the same LinkedIn Group, Arthur Paton writes:
Interesting article. It does not address the needed third leg of the stool which would enable application of the knowledge served up by advanced technology and systems. Access to information and knowledge does not necessarily advance learning. The danger is a role that would include managing knowledge with no link to learning.
Posted by Michele Meador at the LinkedIn KM Professionals Group:
What great fodder for class discussion with my EMBA cohorts. Up to this point we’ve been challenged to analyze the role of the CIO as becoming the new CEO and I think sometimes I’m the only one puzzled by this direction? Well done and beautifully written! This article does a fantastic job explaining why my eyebrows are raised at the former notion because I’ve been asking … where are the CKOs? All the dilemmas about knowledge transfer, capture or strategy that I’m hearing seem to get caught up in the age old battle between ‘IT’ and ‘Business.’ My short answer, come to us, the knowledge strategists; we’re like Switzerland.
Guy responds: What a fine, thoughtful response! And thank you for the kind words. And you’re inspiring me to take this to Columbia’s IKnS students and see what their reaction will be. Appreciate your commenting.
Ben Keefe at the SLA LinkedIn Group writes:
Do you think that there is a potential problem when we start talking about “strategic information”? While a Chief Knowledge Strategist may deal with some complex information, shouldn’t he or she also be worrying about some more mundane details like making sure that the way the phone system works is documented and accessible to everyone?
Guy responds: Thanks, Ben, for that good observation. Actually, I think Cooke is covering the mundane details when he writes about the CSIO (what we call Chief Knowledge Strategist) being distracted by “regularly occurring delivery issues and problems that today’s CIO typically deals with.” But you’re on to something. I think what’s causing much of the problem is the combination this senior manager has to deal with: is he or she to focus on matching knowledge strategy with the corporate business strategy, or focus on those day-to-day mundane details? Great topic for discussion, and I’m having lots of fun with this with my students in Columbia’s IKnS graduate program, where at the moment we are working with the whole big subject of management and leadership in the knowledge domain. Thanks for that good comment, Ben.
Interesting discussion…
I like the “IT as pipline, and knowledge is the flow”. Basically, I see IT as the pipleine, but all that flows witin includes data, information, market intelligence, and knowledge (or should be). The job of the CIO, CKO, CKS (whatever C-titled) is to manage the pipeline, stock and flow of data/information/intelligence/knowledge. The business goals includes value creation (value proposition), competitive advantage (strategy), effectiveness and efficiency (operations) in tandenm with the inormation hierarchy (aka knowledge hierarchy)
The challenging question is whether we are clear on the differences and purposes of data, information, and knowledge in business. (Too many don’t care)
Ref:
Liew, A. (2007) Data, information, knowledge and their inter-relationships. Journal of Knkowledge Management Practice, 7, 2.
KK Aw at LinkedIn’s Knowledge Management Group comments:
Guy, perhaps the reason there are no comments here is because we don’t have any vocal CIOs here [at the LinkedIn Knowledge Management Group]. Also, we only have KM consultants and managers with hardly anyone focusing on “the strategic information needs of the organization”. No wonder KM has such a bad name.
Guy’s response to KK:
Good insight, KK. Makes me wonder if the gap between CIOs and KM consultants and managers isn’t wider than we think it is. Perhaps I’m too much of an optimist.
Maybe we can change KM’s bad name? I think leaders of the organizations where we work as managers and consultants would benefit from KM having a better reputation, if indeed that “bad name” is how we’re thought of. Not generally my experience, but there are a lot of KM consultants and managers out there, and perhaps their experience is different from mine.
Thanks for responding.
KK Aw: I am all for strategic information management. Unfortunately, when we are young, we are engrossed in acquiring various skills. As we get older, we start to appreciate the value of management and leadership. Only after some failures or mediocre performance that we start to appreciate the need for good strategy and for that strategic information management is almost a prerequisite.
Victor Newman at the LinkedIn Institute for Knowledge and Innovation Group writes:
Strangely enough, I have recently published a book on this topic: “Power House – Strategic Knowledge Management: Insights, Practical Tools and Techniques”. But Knowledge Strategy is only partially about IT systems, it’s more about the nature of a different conversation that is necessary to build new market value. Also available in iPad download!: http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/296212\
Guy replies:
Great. Really happy to have that reference. Will be taking a look. Congratulations, Victor. Again, thanks for letting us know.
Good Article. The idea of CIO is that (CSIO) only. No need to rename it as something else. Only that all along the CIO has been doing other things than managing information. This is largely because the fundamental technology of IT was evolving rapidly(mainframe, client server, web, java, html,rdbms, and so on). Now it has become steady. What is rapidly evolving now is not the underlying technology but new ways to use the technology (social networks, web2.0, data minning and so on). That is the role of CIO. Managing Information and that is what it is time to focus on now.