Diana Montalion Opening Keynote - Architecture is Designing Knowledge Flow - Explore DDD 2025

Architecture is Designing Knowledge Flow
Diana Montalion

Explore DDD Conference 2025

ABSTRACT
In the tech industry, we are most interested in knowledge stock: What do you know? What information can you apply easily? Whiteboard tests, for example, assess a candidate's stock of knowledge.

This focus is holding many individuals, teams and organizations back. As relational complexity increases, individual knowledge stock is insufficient. What we need is knowledge flow.

When we craft and share knowledge, we enable the best possible decisions, under the circumstances, in the midst of change.

In this talk, we'll explore:
The difference between information, knowledge, understanding and wisdom. In that group ... what is data?
How "management" differs from systems leadership
The emerging practice of developing knowledge systems as a core architectural practice.

As Larry Prusak says, "Companies that don’t adapt to understanding knowledge as a force of production … will slowly die, and will never know what killed them." The same is true for technology teams ... we are knowledge workers designing knowledge flows. How does this change our approaches?

About our SPEAKER
If you’ve read The Economist, donated to Wikipedia, or contributed to The World Monuments Fund, you’ve interacted with systems that Diana helped to architect.

She has 20+ years experience delivering initiatives, independently or as part of a professional services group, to clients including Stanford, The Gates Foundation and Teach For All. Diana is founder of Mentrix, a consultancy providing enterprise systems architecture, technology strategy and diverse workshops on nonlinear approaches. She publishes Architecting Systems weekly and is the author of the O'Reilly book, Learning Systems Thinking: Essential Nonlinear Skills & Practices for Software Professionals.

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