Lesson 4.24.2 KSoR knows

In everyday life. A school puts one official term calendar on its website, instead of a different date in each teacher's handout.

A KSoR, or Knowledge System of Record, is the governed, authoritative knowledge layer. It holds what the organization officially knows and how it operates: policies, procedures, thresholds and definitions. Its design fits in one line: one authoritative record, one governance boundary, many open projections.¹ In plain words: one official copy, one way to change it, and many ways to read it.

The school calendar. One official copy on the website, and the handouts lose.

• One authoritative record. There is one AP policy, not one in a project and another in an email. A new version replaces the old one in the record, and the old one is marked as retired.
• One governance boundary. Knowledge changes through review and approval by a named person, and every version is kept. A draft is not policy until someone with authority approves it. Each version has the date it takes effect, and the version in force on the day of a decision governs that decision. An August invoice paid in October is judged by version 3.
• Many open projections. People read the record as pages. Workers read the same record through a governed interface: the worker sends a question and gets back the passage that answers it, with its version and owner, or nothing. The record's header, its owner, version and approval date, travels with every projection. Nobody keeps a separate copy for the machines.

A worker reading a KSoR can do two things that a worker reading a loose file cannot. It cites: every answer points to the approved concept and version it came from. And it abstains: when the record does not contain the answer, it says so instead of filling the gap with whatever the model knows.¹ In a run at night, the KSoR gives the worker an answer it can cite, or a flag when the record is silent. At nine, it gives the person a citation to check in ten seconds. A KSoR starts small, with the sources the role names, and each abstention is a request for the next entry, which the record's owner decides. A fact about a vendor is current state, read from the record. What to do about it is knowledge, and when the record is silent the worker abstains.

Wednesday's failure was a knowledge failure. The approved policy existed, but it was badly published, and the worker answered from the retired copy it could see. With a KSoR, version 3 of the approval-limits entry would be the only approved version, owned by Dave and dated September 1. The answer would read "Yes. Invoices over $5,000 need the controller's approval (AP policy v3, approved September 1)." Maria could check that citation in ten seconds.

This book is kept in a KSoR of that kind: a repository of pages with versions, owners and approvals, read by people as a site and by workers through a connector.