Knowledge manager

Spark Trajectory Intranet and Digital Workplace Roles and Teams > This role

What does the role Knowledge manager do?

The Knowledge Manager is responsible for designing and operating the processes, systems, and standards by which the organisation captures, maintains, and shares its knowledge. This covers knowledge repositories, taxonomy, content lifecycle governance, expertise directories, and the practices that ensure valuable knowledge is retained and accessible rather than trapped in individuals or teams. The role is most prevalent in Legal, Professional Services, and other knowledge-intensive sectors, and has gained renewed relevance as AI retrieval tools make the quality of the organisational knowledge corpus a direct factor in the accuracy of AI-generated answers.

Also known as

  • Knowledge management specialist
  • KM manager
  • Knowledge and information manager
  • Head of knowledge
  • Knowledge services manager
  • Organisational learning manager
  • Knowledge and collaboration manager
  • Information and knowledge specialist
Sectoral prevalence

This role is found in specific organisations based on industry sector

Primary responsibilties

  • Designs and governs the organisation's knowledge repositories, taxonomy, and classification frameworks
  • Establishes and enforces metadata standards including ownership, review dates, and content status
  • Manages the content lifecycle governance process covering review cycles, archival, and disposition
  • Maintains expertise directories and knowledge-sharing processes that surface institutional knowledge
  • Monitors corpus health including staleness, duplication, and authority gaps
  • Advises on the implications of AI retrieval for knowledge quality and governance requirements
  • Works to encourage a culture of knowledge-sharing and drive adoption of knowledge systems.

Related teams

We've known this role to be part of the following teams:
Knowledge Management Team

Skills profile

Note: This is what we documented as an exemplar. It's unlikely to always be the case and relates to a role's involvement with the delivery of digital employee experience and perhaps not everything they do. You can open this in the Skills Profile Builder if you want to customise it.

Apprentice

Limited but increasing capabilities based on learning and on-the-job experience, but guidance and mentoring is required to fulfil potential.

Practitioner

Good professional capabilities sufficient for many circumstances and roles. Able to guide and mentor apprentices.

Master

Abilities that are the best in the professional field, gained from significant experience. Able to teach and guide others in their development.
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Outline job description

The Knowledge Manager designs and operates the systems, processes, and standards by which the organisation captures, maintains, and shares what it knows. It's a specialist role most prevalent in knowledge-intensive sectors including Legal, Professional Services, Consulting and Financial Services. It's also a role whose relevance has grown sharply as AI retrieval tools make the quality of the organisational knowledge corpus a direct factor in the accuracy of AI-generated answers.

About the role

You'll be responsible for the knowledge repositories, taxonomy, content lifecycle governance, expertise directories, and the practices that ensure valuable knowledge is retained and accessible rather than locked away in individuals or teams. The role spans strategy and operations: defining what good looks like and making sure the day-to-day processes actually deliver it.

The Knowledge Manager typically sits in a standalone Knowledge Management Team or function, with dotted-line relationships into IT, Legal, and digital workplace teams depending on the organisation. In some contexts the role overlaps with or absorbs the responsibilities of an Information Architect or Taxonomy Specialist.

What you'll actually be doing

A significant part of the job is building and maintaining the governance infrastructure that keeps knowledge usable over time, including review cycles, ownership frameworks, archival processes and metadata standards. But you'll also be doing the more human-facing work: running communities of practice, developing the expertise directories, and helping the organisation develop better habits around knowledge capture and sharing.

Increasingly, you'll be advising on the implications of AI retrieval for knowledge quality, helping the organisation understand how the state of its knowledge content affects what AI tools say on its behalf.

What we're looking for

Broad knowledge management expertise: not just taxonomy or content governance in isolation, but the full picture: communities of practice, expertise networks, knowledge capture from projects, and the cultural as well as technical dimensions of making knowledge accessible. Experience governing a body of knowledge at scale, ideally in a sector where knowledge is the primary product.

Strong skills in information architecture, taxonomy, and metadata standards are expected, along with a growing understanding of how AI retrieval systems interact with knowledge quality.

Typical background

Most people in this role come from information science, library science, or knowledge management professional backgrounds. CILIP, AIIM, or KM professional qualifications are common. Sector experience, particularly in Legal, Professional Services, or Consulting, is frequently required at senior level.

Knowledge management roles can also involve substantial amounts of adoption and change management, required at all levels of the organisation.

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Errors? Disagreements? Omissions?

We have hopefully created these exemplars with thought and care. It is not the only way of looking at these roles and teams in the world, and relates specifically to the intranet and digital workplance profession. It therefore concentrates on some things and ignores others.

If you find an error, disagree wholeheartly or feel there is a glaring ommission we'd love to know.

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License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Creative Commons License

Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.