Chief networking officer

The chief networking officer (CNO) is a business networking position in a company or other organization. The term refers less commonly to a technical executive position in the computer industry.

Business networking

In the business networking context, a chief networking officer manages the social capital of a company. The CNO connects people and businesses within the company, with other companies, and with consumers. The CNO's mission is to facilitate know-how transfer and information flow, fostering innovation, safeguarding diversity, and facilitating profit growth.^[1] Chief networking officers are responsible for creation and cultivation of new communities and acquisition of pre-existing communities.^[2] Other definitions, such as one by the Wharton Global Business Forum in India, include managing outreach, communication and logistics, usually in partnership with the chief operating officer."^[3]

As the CNO position builds on soft skills culturally common to women, it can advance women’s careers in areas such as public policy and large-scale business development.^[4] Although the position has been around since 2004, there is an ongoing academic debate related to the issue of CNOs—or even the need for CNOs— in modern business.

Responsibilities

A Chief Networking Officer is the corporate business networks portfolio manager. Along with their team, the Chief Networking Officer centrally manages the business networks environment. They strive to solve conflicts in ways that serve mutual best interests. The CNO is a direct contact, although not primary, and will always be ready to assume the management of any partnership with any stakeholders during primary network manager absence. This professional maps out and organizes all resources available inside the network, i.e., contacts, experiences, success stories, knowledge, competences and business opportunities. Finally, they set up long-term partnerships with fair and well-defined mutually beneficial gains with each stakeholder inside all business networks.

The CNO is a serving leader, concerned with self-development of each member of the internal network, and qualifying them to reach their goals. The CNO can only directly impact the employees network. All others are outside their direct control, but in their area of influence. The CNO achieves recognition of peers from various and different networks that surrounds their community-enterprise, creating strong interdependence among all parties and synergy with the whole. The CNO is the business networks portfolio strategist, acting as coach and trainer during implementation of related projects during transition from existing and traditional model towards a virtual agile global networking enterprise. To successfully implement this project, the CNO must have cooperation from all departments.

In summary, a CNO's job requires a higher value and moral code strategic thinker who possesses unshakable credibility—a moved-by-challenges professional skillful at managing partnerships. This person must possess clear, objective communication skills so they can guide personnel development. This executive must be creative and participative in harmonizing different interests, expectations, and needs among networks. The position requires negotiation experience, knowledge of the company, and knowledge of the marketplace. Finally, understanding coaching methodology is useful for managing people.^[5]

Computer networking

In computer networking, the chief networking officer is "responsible for network strategy, advanced network product development, and translation to line products of future networking and distributed computing technologies."^[6]

Notes and references