Software is a knowledge artefact
Software is a knowledge artefact that outlines the procedures for acquiring, modifying, retaining, and transmitting information.
Manufacturing organizations as a parallel
To make this accessible, consider, for a moment, a manufacturing company producing soft drinks, like Coca-Cola. The company has a particular recipe that is executed over and over with great accuracy to deliver a consistent product. The recipe takes raw ingredients as input and combines them in a tested way to produce outputs. Beverage creators can meticulously implement this recipe to achieve the desired results. To make the desired drink on a large scale, industrial engineers are responsible for transforming this recipe into a sequence of actions performed on the ingredients using complex machinery. The truck leaves the gate with bottles of Coke. Money arrives in return.
Software is knowledge recipes
Similarly, in knowledge organizations like insurance, business rules, procedures, and processes are the recipes for transforming information inputs into information outputs. To achieve scale, software engineers are tasked to codify these recipes into a sequence of actions executed on the information using digital machinery (compute infrastructure).
The sequence of actions represents knowledge, and the object upon which this sequence is applied is also knowledge. So there is two layers at play here. The knowledge is in the pipe AND the knowledge is the pipe.
Notes
- This post is part of a series. See here.