Any new enterprise initiative is highly vulnerable during its earliest stages. Established leaders tend to suspect interloping and potential loss of resources or relative clout. Workers at all levels — weary of an endless parade of shallow management campaigns and reorganizations — tend to view any new fanfare as a warning to brace for further disturbance and friction. An initiative such as KM, to have a chance of success, requires the devoted attention of at least one corporate-level implementer. In our case, I am that person.

This is my fifth week as chief knowledge officer (CKO) for my organization. So far, my secondary role (deputy chief information officer [dCIO]) has consumed most of my time and attention. While I find the CIO responsibilities interesting and rewarding, I can see clearly that combining these two roles is not a very workable idea. One or the other — or both — will definitely suffer.

So why is the position configured this way? Two years ago, while in a different role, I helped convince the CIO of the need for a CKO and knowledge management (KM) approach in our organization. The CIO recognized that the organizational leader (let’s call him the CEO) at that time might not have been able to embrace the notion of KM. The CEO was often unreadable on an issue until he dismissed it outright, banning further discussion. The CIO was practicing risk management. Believing in the need for KM, but feeling the time was not right for an overt appeal to the CEO, the CIO began laying the groundwork for KM. He formed an informal alliance with a key second-tier leader who oversaw a large division of the organization. You could say they were implementing stealth KM.

The CKO position was first advertised in November of 2006. I applied. After a couple of months, the personnel department discovered that the position had to be re-advertised, due to having been brought under a new federal personnel system. I re-applied. Due to other mistakes on the the part of the personnel agency, the CIO had to go through an extremely tedious and lengthy process to respond to each of the many applications. Even so, yet more problems with the manner of advertisement were discovered and the position had to be re-advertised once more. In all, I believe there were four advertisements. The position was finally filled in July of this year, eight months after the first advertisement. This was under the new, more streamlined hiring system, with a qualified applicant in the pool from the beginning. Through it all, the CIO persevered, believing in the necessity of KM and of having a CKO dedicated to the KM effort. Sometimes doing the rational thing in a government agency can require astonishing persistence in the face of numbing, time-consuming, idiotic bureaucracy.

But here I am, a newly minted CKO, enmeshed in the sticky web of day-to-day information technology and workforce management issues. Once again, the insightful CIO recognizes my quandary and is working with other leaders to find a solution (getting a separate position for his deputy authorized and filled, and getting the CKO role resituated closer to the new CEO). Regardless of whether he succeeds in this effort, we agreed that I have to be freed from the daily minutiae of IT management.