Back in 2010, Morten Hansen and Scott Tap wondered Who Should Be Your Chief Collaboration Officer, stating

Companies need an executive responsible for integrating the enterprise — a Chief Collaboration Officer (CCO). Increasingly, companies are embracing collaboration as part of their strategy to grow, by cross-selling products to existing customers and innovating through the recombination of existing technologies. But this won’t work unless employees work effectively across silos — across sales offices, business units, sales, product development, and marketing.

And who’s in charge of such an effort? In most companies today, senior executives are still responsible for their unit — sales, marketing, HR, division A, division B. Yes, they are told to be team players and work with their peers. But that is often not enough. You need someone to look after the whole, by taking a holistic view of what is needed to get employees to work across silos.

You may say, “sure, that’s the CEO’s role.” True. But the CEO cannot afford to spend too much time on it. The CEO needs someone more dedicated to the effort — a Chief Collaboration Officer.

The authors went on to suggest that a new C-level executive wasn’t necessary, that one of the various well-accepted CxO roles could assume this new focus. However, they excluded the CEO, saying that she was too busy coordinating the business as a whole. They offered reasons why this should fall to the CIO, COO, head of HR, head of strategy, and even the CFO.

Strangely absent from the list is the CMO: strange, because in many companies the emergence of social tools and modern social network-based collaboration starts with social media in the marketing organization. Also absent in their list is the Chief Customer Officer, which is another title that wasn’t very common in 2010, when their article was published.

I don’t see the sense of handing this over to the CFO. They are historically the least attuned to and most skeptical about the value of social, although that seems to be changing in the past year (see CFO’s Anti-Social Tendencies May Be Changing).

There is a strong argument to be made that the role of HR is in need of a radical recasting in today’s business. First of all, as Pawel Brodzinski pointed out a few years ago,

People aren’t your most valuable resource. People aren’t [a] goddamn resource at all.

His point is that people aren’t a commodity, like oil or orange juice, that can be bought,  traded, or sold. People are people, and if there is one thing that the social revolution should be focusing on is how to leverage the emergent properties of people working through social relationships, which is where future productivity increases are likely to come from. So we can drop the stale, industrial metaphors where we pretend that people are resources.

So, no surprise, the Chief Social Officer should be the Chief People Officer. This should be the executive charged with the well-being, training, recruitment, and connectedness of the company’s workforce. She should have control of the various software technologies necessary to make that happen, and coordinate closely with executives leading other lines of business or functional areas. This role should be made more central to the business, on a par with Sales, Marketing, and Customer areas, and not simply an in-house recruitment service.

Obviously, the role of CIO is changing quickly in today’s work as well, with more technology moving to the cloud, and companies adopting BYOD policies, the role of the CIO is shrinking: that does not mean she should be given control of social, because most of what is involved in not the tools, but social practices.