I was struck by this candid comment from Dave Pollard on the AOK discussion Group

"I left Ernst & Young LLP last month after 27 years, nine of it as CKO Canada and Global Director of Knowledge Innovation. My job was to keep E&Y on the leading edge of KM, continuing to win awards for what we actually implemented. In recent years I had become increasingly frustrated because E&Y management was ideologically wedded to centralized Knowledge Management and the need for 'submission' (the choice of word alone is telling) of personal knowledge to massive central repositories which had become increasingly irrelevant, devoid of critical context, and hopelessly cluttered."

It's sad to see a company that once seemed to really 'get' KM to go so off the rails. This, to me, is counter-evidence to the "CKO's task is to "do himself out of a job" argument. Organisations change constantly, and the KM aspect needs to be renewed and championed through that change. Nobody would say "right, we have our financial processes defined, everyone subscribes to them, so we don't need a CFO or auditors anymore".