What knowledge does a business need to capture?

If you talk to business rules or security vendors, you get one answer. If you talk to database and modeling folks, you get another answer. If you talk to business process or social networking vendors, you guessed it - yet other answers!

However, to understand, support and protect a business, its work products and its organizational units, you need all the following knowledge:

• Who - the social/organizational aspects to understand responsibilities, privileges, networks, interdependencies and more
  
• How - the processes and tasks of the business, describing the states of the business and interactions among its agents, hopefully tying together and allowing a progression from high-level descriptions to the necessary level of detail (and this information should address both the human and automated aspects of the processes and tasks)
  
• Why - the intentions, goals and beliefs of the business (they really need to be written down and used in decision-making)
  
• What - the basic terminologies and domain concepts, along with their meanings, details/attributes and relationships
  

BTW, you also need the lineage or pedigree of the knowledge and how it has changed over time. Time and change are very critical aspects of business! Details of a change (before and after) or the temporal relevancy of information are often important to retain, especially for compliance reasons.

Any of this data defined and used in isolation is incomplete and therefore, subject to interpretation and erroneous assumptions. At worst, the data disagrees from one usage or silo to the next, and then your business is just waiting for the next fire to put out!

It is necessary to find a way to tie all the usages and silos of information (written of course in different syntaxes, from different vendors, using different standards) together!