Software may or may not he a form of knowledge creation, depending on whether the software gets scrapped or if it remains in place for a long time. I find that costly frequent software updates and expensive program maintenance is a form of planned destruction of knowledge capital. Clients' data allow me to compute knowledge capital for their benchmark peer groups. From analyzing thousands of corporations I've produced a knowledge capital ranking by industry and by country. I calculate the ratio of finance capital to knowledge capital.
Finance capital exceeds knowledge capital in industries like mining and timber.
Where firms deploy almost no finance capital and their valuation is based on knowledge capital, the ratio of knowledge capital to finance capital is as high as 400. The CKO is an attempt to circumvent the CIO because someone needs hold the fiduciary accountability for knowledge assets and the present CIOs are not likely to do that. The present generation of CFOs also do not have an inclination to become involved with the valuation of intangibles, since they already hold the fiduciary accountability for measurable financial assets. The future CKO should be an executive to certify the integrity, security and custody of a firm's knowledge assets as these assets become the most important components of shareholder value. My data show that U.S. corporations have four to eight times more knowledge assets than financial assets.