My white paper on DDD is almost finished, althought I still feel I've lot of refining and rework to do, its time to confront an audience with it, since the primary motivation behind this text was to make a bold claim for DDD - wich is genuine OO as it was intendet in the first place. Here my {executive, implemeter's, casual-reader's} summary as a teaser: Software is more than often not a valuable asset in your strategic portfolio: the implementation works that’s true, but can you adapt its intrinsic business concepts easily to meet the changing requirements you face? Did your business analysts and your developers take the opportunity to elaborate an abstraction of your business with formal elegance and cognitive depth, thus creating a common classification about the core concepts of your business? Further, does the implementation of your core business reflect these well understood concepts so that the code is structured along the boundaries of these concepts and they are isolated and therefore exchangeable when the need arises?

Object Oriented Analysis and Design provides well suited instruments to transform your software black box into a central intellectual asset, that provides (1) an ubiquitous language about the topics and relationships in your business, shared among business and development departments and (2) augments therefore the reasoning about core concepts not only for implementers but more important for decision makers. In fact their mental model is reflected in the constructs of the software implementation et vice versa. Therefore I would consider Domain Driven Design as a knowledge management instrument.