What the Chief Workforce Officer owns, and what it must never own
A role is defined as much by what it refuses as by what it takes. Four responsibilities, three exclusions, one reporting line.
Iman Abrishamchi··6 min readNew executive roles fail in one of two ways. They are given everything that touches their topic and become a bottleneck, or they are given a title and no decision rights and become a commentator. The Chief Workforce Officer should be defined narrowly enough to avoid both.
Four things the CWO owns
Composition. For every major family of tasks, the decision of what share is done by people, by agents and by the two together, and how fast that share changes. Today this decision is made nowhere; it emerges from software purchases and is discovered afterwards. The CWO makes it a decision.
Allocation. The rules by which a task goes to a person or an agent. My argument throughout this series is that the right rule is the cost of verifying the output, not only the cost of producing it. Cheap to check, give it to the agent; expensive to check, keep a person on it or invest in making the check cheaper first.
Performance of the whole capacity. Output, quality, incidents, customer outcomes, and the human time spent supervising, measured across people and agents together. Not agent utilisation, which flatters the system, and not headcount, which flatters the cut.
Governance. The agent lifecycle from selection to retirement, the assignment of a named accountable human to every agent, and the redesign of human roles around the agents, including the protection of the entry layer.
Three things the CWO must never own
The technology. Models, vendors, data architecture, security and the platform stay with the chief information officer. A CWO who owns the stack will be judged on the stack and will stop being able to say that a working system should not be deployed. The CIO is the CWO's most demanding counterpart, and should remain exactly that.
Ethics and legal findings. The CWO acts on them; the CWO does not produce them. A role that both governs the agents and judges whether they are lawful has an interest in finding that they are.
Daily operations. The CWO sets the boundaries, the verification standards and the lifecycle; line leaders run the work inside them, as they always have. A chief human resources officer does not manage every employee, and a CWO does not manage every agent.
The reporting line
The CWO reports to the chief executive and sits beside the CIO and the chief financial officer, because the three will disagree and the organisation needs the disagreement in the open. A CWO under the CIO approves whatever the stack can do. A CWO under the CFO approves whatever is cheapest this quarter. Only a CWO with a direct line can hold the position that matters most: that an agent which is cheaper and more capable should still not be deployed where no one can check its work.
In most organisations this role will be the chief human resources officer with a larger mandate, and the title can wait. The mandate cannot, because the decisions it covers are being made every week by whoever controls a software budget. The point of writing down what the role owns and refuses is to make it possible to give it to someone on Monday.