Digital chefs in the CEO’s kitchen
Every time we let a new category of software run up the hype curve, we declare the need for another C-level Executive. Here are a few:
· 1990’s: Knowledge Management – Chief Knowledge Officer
· 2000’s: Innovation – Chief Innovation Officer
· 2010’s: Social Business – Chief Social Business Officer
The assertion was super compelling for each of these. Back in 2002, Dundas, Ontario-based Intellectual Capital Research put forth these incredibly compelling statistics for the need for a Chief Knowledge Officer:
· 25 per cent of Fortune 500 companies currently have CKOs;
· 80 per cent of Fortune 500 companies currently have KM staff;
· From 1997-2000, the Ford Motor Company saved $914 million, mainly due to effective knowledge management programs;
· 95 per cent of CEOs polled at the 2001 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, said that KM was critical to organizational success.
Fast-forward to 2014 and the CKO has long disappeared in most industries, save for a few such as the Professional services businesses where people and knowledge are the product. Innovation and Social Business faced a similar fate.
The newest contender for a seat at the CEO’s table is the Chief Digital Officer to oversee Digital Transformation. I truly believe that Digital Transformation has incredible promise but I worry that with a very top-heavy structure, it’s being set up to fail as spectacularly as its predecessors.
In this guest post on Diginomica, I’ve tried to lay out a suggested approach for coordinating vs. executing Digital Transformation.
