The Business Agility Manifesto^[1] focuses intensely on business knowledge.  What's the Manifesto talking about?

Business knowledge doesn't need to be mysterious.  The Manifesto defines it as follows:

business knowledge:  the total set of business concepts, their organizing connections, and the business rules upon which the existence of the business depends

Business knowledge is definitely not software development knowledge.  At the most basic level, business knowledge consists of two key ingredients:  business definitions of terms — a corporate vocabulary in the form of a concept model — and business rules.

Those two things are singled out because they are fundamental to precision in a highly complex world.  They are also key to what the Manifesto material calls reconfiguration agility — the ability to change products and processes as fast as possible in a completely traceable, repeatable, and reliable way.^[2]

The Manifesto prescribes that business knowledge be explicit, not tacit.  That's where today's approaches fall down.  Furthermore, it must be expressed "in a form accessible to all business audiences."^[3]  Obviously software code doesn't fit the bill(!).

In a broader sense, business knowledge is about the company's capacity to retain corporate memory and to demonstrate comprehensive compliance — without any dependence on individual workers or static documentation.

Unfortunately, when someone makes a decision today about changing a policy or process, that knowledge evaporates as soon as it is created.  It's simply gone.  Poof!  That just won't do in a knowledge economy.  And it certainly won't do if your goal is permanent transparency.

In short, the Manifesto identifies business knowledge as a mandatory business asset for the Knowledge Age.  As such, it needs to be "under the purview of general management."

References

[1]  The Business Agility Manifesto:  Building for Change, by Roger T. Burlton,  Ronald G. Ross, and John A. Zachman, (2017) https://busagilitymanifesto.org/

[2]   https://busagilitymanifesto.org/accompaniments/supplements/sidebar-for-the-software-industry

[3]  For example, business rules can be expressed in RuleSpeak® — www.RuleSpeak.com

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