Companies Hiring Chief Knowledge Officers (CKOs)
Chief knowledge officers are becoming essential members of the corporate executive team.
- (1888PressRelease) September 27, 2011 - Hamilton, Canada - The best and most-competitive companies in the new information age will put their money where their data is by creating CKOs or chief knowledge officers, according to Dr. Nick Bontis, leading academic researcher and author of "Information Bombardment: Rising Above the Digital Onslaught."
"Chief knowledge officers are becoming essential members of the corporate executive team," says Dr. Bontis. "These professionals are hired not only to protect a company's intellectual capital but to grow it as well. In the knowledge era, growing intellectual capital is essential for survival."
As Dr. Bontis explains, intellectual capital is not the same as intellectual property. Intellectual capital accounts for the difference between a company's book value and its actual stock-market value. Intellectual capital is the knowledge and information embedded within the organization that doesn't appear on any accounting balance sheet.
"If you took the total value of a company as calculated by accountants and bankers, generally speaking, it would be an underestimate of the firm's true worth," Dr. Bontis says, "Intellectual capital is a much more valuable asset than most people realize, yet because it is intangible, it is somewhat difficult to value. Chief knowledge officers are the guardians of a company's intellectual capital."
Research conducted by the Institute for Intellectual Capital Research shows that only a small fraction of publically-traded companies have CKOs (or equivalents) in place. Dr. Bontis states that the totals are less than fifteen percent in the US and five percent in Canada. Scandinavian companies have the highest representation at nearly twenty percent.
Unlike IT or HR managers, CKOs have much-broader responsibilities, according to Dr. Bontis. While an IT manager may oversee the technical configuration of servers, computer systems, and work-flow processes and an HR manager may provide oversight for recruitment, compensation and talent management, CKOs oversee the flow of knowledge inside and outside the corporation. They essentially manage all of the firm's knowledge-based assets including the data embedded in systems and the expertise contained in employees' minds. Dr. Bontis states that three most important objectives of a CKO are to: transfer employee tacit knowledge into explicit information systems, accelerate collaboration among employees in various departments, and ensure that knowledge-based assets are protected, developed, measured and harvested for financial gain.
Dr. Bontis explains that intellectual capital is composed of three subcomponents: human capital, structural capital, and relational capital. Chief knowledge officers develop ways to preserve and foster each of these components in order to maximize total intellectual capital.
Typical responsibilities of a chief knowledge officer may include the following, as well as many others:
* Overseeing exit interviews of HR departments
* Development of human capital analytics within the organization
* Identifying efficient and productive processes for coding information in the firm
* Creating causal models of interorganizational relationships and knowledge flows
* Capturing information and knowledge from external partnerships and relationships
As Dr. Bontis describes in his book, chief knowledge officers look for existing information and knowledge inside and outside an organization, then seek to increase this capital while preserving knowledge assets. Because information is today's most-valuable resource, having a CKO is a wise move, to say the least.
About the author:
Dr. Nick Bontis was named a 2010 top five speaker worldwide for management and one of the world's top management gurus of 2010, along with such luminaries as Jack Welch, Tom Peters, Michael Porter, and Jim Collins. He is an internationally sought-after management consultant and keynote speaker, hand-picked by the United Nations, the US Navy, Microsoft, IBM, Accenture, KPMG, Century 21, and others to help navigate the knowledge era. He is a popular TV and radio personality, a leading academic researcher, and an award-winning, tenured professor of strategic management at McMaster University. As one of the world's most-cited authors in the fields of intellectual capital and knowledge management, he has amassed over a dozen prestigious teaching and research awards. He was recently recognized as a 3M National Teaching Fellow, an exclusive honor bestowed upon the top professors in the nation.
For more information, contact Dr. Bontis at nick ( @ ) bontis dot com or visit www dot InformationBombardment dot com dot
"Information Bombardment: Rising Above the Digital Onslaught" is available on Amazon.com.
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