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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Knowledge Management Director

💰 $120,000 - $200,000

Knowledge ManagementInformation ManagementLeadershipDigital Workplace

🎯 Role Definition

The Knowledge Management Director is a strategic leader responsible for defining and executing an enterprise KM roadmap that aligns with business priorities. You will architect and operationalize knowledge capture and reuse practices across the organization, lead cross-functional programs (taxonomy, content governance, search relevance, knowledge bases, and learning transfer), and measure impact through KM metrics and continuous improvement. This role combines people leadership, vendor and platform management, and hands-on information architecture to deliver measurable improvements in time-to-value, service resolution, and employee enablement.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Knowledge Manager or Knowledge Lead
  • Information Architect or Taxonomy Specialist
  • Senior Program Manager (Digital Workplace / Collaboration)

Advancement To:

  • VP / Head of Knowledge Management
  • Chief Knowledge Officer / Chief Learning Officer
  • Head of Digital Experience or Chief Digital Officer

Lateral Moves:

  • Head of Information Governance
  • Director, Learning & Development
  • Director, Customer Experience / Support Operations

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Develop and own a multi-year, enterprise-level knowledge management strategy and roadmap that aligns with corporate objectives, improves employee productivity, and reduces operational risk.
  • Lead design and implementation of knowledge architecture, including taxonomy, metadata schema, ontology, and content classification standards to ensure consistent findability across systems.
  • Oversee the selection, deployment, integration, and ongoing optimization of KM platforms and tools (e.g., Confluence, SharePoint, ServiceNow Knowledge, Zendesk Guide, iManage, AI-driven search and chatbots).
  • Establish and govern content lifecycle processes—creation, review, approval, publishing, archival, and deletion—working with legal and compliance to enforce retention and privacy policies.
  • Create and manage a content governance framework and RACI model that delegates ownership to SMEs and business units while maintaining central oversight and quality standards.
  • Lead a cross-functional KM council and stakeholder network to prioritize knowledge investments, define SLAs for content currency, and drive adoption across business units.
  • Design and execute a taxonomy and tagging program to standardize terminology, reduce duplication, and enable enterprise search and analytics.
  • Implement enterprise search optimization strategies (relevance tuning, synonyms, query analytics) to continuously improve search success rates and reduce time-to-answer.
  • Build and run measurement and analytics programs to quantify KM impact (time saved, ticket deflection, onboarding speed, resolution rates, NPS), and present ROI to executive leadership.
  • Lead knowledge capture initiatives that extract expertise from departing employees, SMEs, and project teams—creating playbooks, runbooks, lessons learned, and decision logs.
  • Establish communities of practice (CoPs), subject-matter networks, and knowledge champions to scale knowledge sharing and sustain cultural change.
  • Integrate KM with learning, HR onboarding, customer support, product documentation, and incident management processes to enable consistent knowledge reuse and transfer.
  • Sponsor and manage complex KM projects including migrations, content consolidation, taxonomy redesign, and integrations with CRM, ITSM, and analytics platforms.
  • Oversee KM change management and communications—build adoption campaigns, training curricula, and incentives that increase contributor participation and content quality.
  • Lead vendor evaluation, contract negotiation, and vendor management for KM technologies, search engines, taxonomy tools, and AI augmentation partners.
  • Drive automation and AI/ML initiatives to surface relevant knowledge (recommendation engines, semantic search, auto-tagging, summarization, LLM-based assistants) while managing model governance and hallucination risk.
  • Ensure knowledge assets meet security, compliance, and privacy standards; partner with Information Security and Records Management to classify and protect sensitive information.
  • Manage the KM team: hire, mentor, set goals, and allocate resources across programs such as taxonomy, content operations, analytics, and platform administration.
  • Define and enforce KPIs and SLAs for knowledge accuracy, recency, adoption, search success, and contributor responsiveness; iterate based on results.
  • Lead periodic content quality audits, gap analyses, and redundancy elimination programs to improve content relevance and reduce maintenance burden.
  • Facilitate cross-functional post-mortems and lessons-learned sessions to ensure project knowledge is captured and institutionalized.
  • Serve as the executive liaison for KM topics—prepare board/executive briefings, roadmap updates, and case studies demonstrating business outcomes.
  • Manage KM budget and resource allocation, including capital expenditures for tooling, professional services, and staff development.
  • Champion a culture of knowledge sharing by designing recognition programs, contributor onboarding, and playbooks that make it simple to capture and reuse knowledge.
  • Coordinate knowledge transfer activities during M&A, divestiture, or restructuring events to preserve intellectual capital and minimize operational disruption.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Assist product and customer support teams with knowledge base content triage and prioritization of FAQ and KB updates.
  • Provide expert input into information architecture decisions for intranet and digital workplace platforms.
  • Help define content tagging and metadata policies to support analytics, personalization, and regulatory reporting.
  • Support risk assessments related to information sharing and retention across distributed teams.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Enterprise knowledge management strategy development and program leadership.
  • Information architecture, taxonomy and ontology design, metadata modeling.
  • Hands-on experience with KM platforms and collaborative tools (Confluence, SharePoint, ServiceNow, Zendesk, iManage, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365).
  • Search technologies and relevance tuning (ElasticSearch, Coveo, Algolia, Lucene) and practical experience improving search KPIs.
  • Familiarity with AI/ML and LLM integrations for knowledge augmentation (auto-summarization, semantic search, retrieval-augmented generation).
  • Data analytics and measurement—ability to define KM metrics, build dashboards (Looker, Tableau, Power BI), and perform ROI analysis.
  • Content governance, records management, retention policy implementation, and compliance alignment (GDPR, HIPAA where applicable).
  • Technical integration skills or experience working with APIs, connectors, and enterprise systems (CRM, ITSM, HRIS) to surface knowledge.
  • Project and program management skills—experience leading cross-functional, multi-vendor programs, migrations, and platform rollouts.
  • Vendor selection, contract negotiation, and vendor lifecycle management for SaaS KM tools.
  • Knowledge capture methodologies—interviewing SMEs, creating playbooks, runbooks, and as-built documentation.
  • Experience with collaborative and learning technologies, community platforms, and social knowledge networks.

Soft Skills

  • Strategic mindset with the ability to translate business goals into measurable KM initiatives.
  • Strong executive presence and stakeholder management—ability to influence senior leaders and build cross-functional coalitions.
  • Excellent written and verbal communication—able to create clear knowledge policies, contributor guidance, and executive reports.
  • Change leadership and facilitation skills—leading adoption, training, and cultural transformation programs.
  • Analytical and problem-solving orientation with a continuous improvement mindset.
  • Empathy and coaching ability to grow knowledge contributors and communities of practice.
  • Prioritization and decision-making under ambiguity and competing stakeholder needs.
  • Detail-oriented with a strong focus on information quality, governance, and risk mitigation.
  • Collaborative mindset—proven success partnering with IT, Legal, HR, Product, and Support teams.
  • Resilience and adaptability in fast-changing environments and during large-scale transformations.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Information Science, Library Science, Business Administration, Computer Science, or related field.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree (MLIS, Information Science, MBA) or equivalent professional certifications in Knowledge Management, Information Architecture, or Project Management.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Information Science / Library & Information Studies
  • Knowledge Management
  • Information Systems or Computer Science
  • Business Administration / Organizational Development
  • Communications or Instructional Design

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 8 - 15+ years in knowledge management, information architecture, digital workplace, or related disciplines.

Preferred:

  • 10+ years leading KM programs at enterprise scale and 5+ years in a people leadership role.
  • Proven track record of delivering measurable business outcomes from KM investments (reduced MTTR, faster onboarding, ticket deflection).
  • Experience integrating AI/LLM capabilities into KM workflows and managing associated governance risks.
  • Demonstrated success with enterprise platform migrations, taxonomy redesigns, and cross-functional change programs.
  • Industry experience relevant to the organization (e.g., technology, professional services, healthcare, finance) is a plus.
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