This paper aims to examine how organisations hold governance knowledge stable enough to execute reliably yet revisable as policies and conventions change. It develops a temporality-focused conceptual elaboration of knowledge management (KM) for executable governance, reading market data rules as boundary objects whose validity is bounded in time.
The study is a retrospective analysis of an existing design artefact – a Python repository for an equity trading ecosystem, built by the authors for an earlier project – from which design knowledge is abstracted using design science research principles, a documented coding protocol and analytic generalisation.
The artefact carries governance knowledge in effective-dated fee regimes resolved deterministically, explicit session and settlement conventions, schema exemplars and fixtures without a validation gate, and reporting treated as an audit output. It supports a lightweight provenance analogue, not formal provenance, answering “what rule applied when” through inspectable configuration and deterministic resolution. Five artefact-level validations pass and are independently reproducible.
One artefact, analysed by those who built it, can support claims about how executable governance may be structured, not about adoption or effectiveness. Propositions are theoretically derived and stated with falsification conditions.
Fee schedules, calendars, schemas and reporting templates should be treated as versioned executable controls, and their defaults as governance decisions requiring review.
Boundary-object theory treats interpretive flexibility as the source of an object’s coordinating power. Executable governance inverts this: flexibility is removed at execution and preserved at review. Naming that inversion, and the design knowledge following from it, is the contribution.
