Page 1 of 17 Knowledge Managers: Who They Are and What They Do December 2001 James D. McKeen and D. Sandy Staples Queen's School of Business, Queen's University, Kingston, Canada K7L 3N6 Knowledge management (the process) and knowledge managers (the people) are recent organizational phenomena. The latter (the knowledge managers) are those key individuals charged with the task of making the former (knowledge management) successful. Due to the recent emergence of these organizational initiatives, a study of knowledge managers – who they are and what they do – was thought to be instructive and revealing as well as being sufficiently current to enable organizations to either adopt or adapt their knowledge management strategy. A survey to reveal the characteristics of knowledge managers as well as knowledge management initiatives was designed and distributed to practicing knowledge managers, primarily from US and Canadian organizations. This chapter, based on the analysis of 41 completed questionnaires, reveals the backgrounds, goals, ambitions, initiatives and challenges as self-assessed by these individuals. By pulling this information together, a profile of a “typical” knowledge manager is presented. The question that remains to be asked is “Are these the most appropriate individuals to lead the KM charge”? Keywords: knowledge management; knowledge managers; knowledge managers’ characteristics; knowledge managers’ activities; organizational knowledge management activities 1 Introduction The emergence of the knowledge management function all started with Peter Drucker's now famous quote in The Post Capitalist Society (1993) … "The basic economic resource - the means of production - is no longer capital, nor natural resources, nor labor. It is and will be knowledge". With such an endorsement and the instant legitimization that followed, organizations began the process of learning how to "manage" this new resource. Organizations higher on the information-intensive scale moved quickly. Positions were fashioned, systems were implemented, and metrics were created as titles such as "knowledge manager" began to dot the organizational panoply. With characteristic adherence to the adage "anything that can't be measured can't be managed", organizations began the search for value directly attributable to knowledge. Armed with oft-repeated success stories and evangelical exuberance, knowledge managers accepted the challenge articulated by senior management. Knowledge management is an emerging management function. As such, we have an opportunity to study its evolution almost from the outset. The purpose of the study reported in this chapter is not only to explore the current organizational role of knowledge management but also to understand the knowledge managers themselves - their career aspirations, backgrounds, challenges, initiatives and key challenges/problems. Our chapter is organized into the following sections. The research questions we investigated and associated literature are described below. A description of the methodology we used to answer our research questions follows. The findings from our study are then presented and discussed.Page 2 of 17 2 Literature Review We had two main objectives for our study. First, we wanted to develop a profile of knowledge managers. Second, we wanted to understand what activities they were working on in their organization. In order to help us meet our objectives, we looked for previous similar studies that had done similar things. We briefly review the studies we found below and describe how our study relates to and adds to the existing body of knowledge. 2.1 Previous Studies Examining Characteristics of Positions Although we were unable to find any existing studies of the characteristics of knowledge managers, various organizational positions such as CEO (Shin, 1999), CIO (Feeny, Edwards, and Simpson, 1992; Stephens, Ledbetter, Mitra and Ford, 1992) and CKO have been studied and we used those approaches to guide and inform our study. Below, we specifically review the existing studies on CKO's because it is the closest position to the focus of our study that has been empirically studied. It has been estimated that the position of Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO) exists in about one-fifth of the Fortune 500 companies, although not all the positions carry the title of CKO (Stewart, 1998). Although the job of CKO is still relatively new for most organizations, it has existed in some firms since the early 1990's, with the big six accounting firms leading the way (Watt, 1997). As far as we could determine, there have only been two studies that examined the characteristics and competencies of CKO's (Duffy, 1998). Bob Guns' study of 52 CKO's in the United States found that the CKO's came from a wide range of backgrounds and were generally hired internally because of a deep knowledge of the business (Duffy, 1998). The author of the study concluded that the skills necessary for a CKO are diverse. A CKO needs to be able to champion knowledge management (KM) initiatives and be able to energize the organization. He/she needs vision, change management skills and strong interpersonal and communication skills. The CKO's studied were business-oriented in that they realized they had to produce concrete business results within a fairly short time period in order to survive and maintain support. Seven main challenges were identified: 1. Set knowledge management strategic priorities, 2. Establish a knowledge database of best practices, 3. Gain commitment of senior executives to support a learning environment, 4. Teach information seekers how to ask better and smarter questions of their intelligent resources, 5. Put in place a process for managing intellectual assets, 6. Obtain customer satisfaction information in near real-time, and 7. Globalize knowledge management. Michael Earl and Ian Scott (1998) studied 20 CKO's from Europe and North America. They found that although CKO's had varied backgrounds, they shared similar personality traits. They tended to be outgoing, extroverted, and persuasive, as well as being high-achievement people. They were able to both play the part of actor on stage and be willing to be behind the scenes, influencing people. Communication skills were critical in terms of building support and commitment to KM programs. Earl and Scott (1999) found that CKO's had two main design competencies.