Our obsession with managing content and data through digital devices is so vast, and indeed severe, that other options are seemingly inconceivable. But as we move from the Information Age to the Knowledge Economy, we are forced to do just that. Otherwise, we face the very real risk of unraveling 2300 years of knowledge. 

It has been over six years since I left Corporate America as an eBusiness analyst, specializing in knowledge management, portals and other collaborative tools. I left to pursue my passion, though oddly I couldn’t explain it beyond generality at the time. As it turns out, I left to pursue knowledge, which couldn’t be more ironic!

Along the way, I’ve met some truly remarkable people from all sorts of backgrounds, few of whom ever heard the term “the knowledge economy.” Yet all of them, whether psychologists or shamans, ethnobotanists or mystics, physicians or physicists, theologians or atheists, Easterners or Westerners, consider “knowledge” to be their principle objective. In this context, Information Technology (IT) is entering the knowledge arena quite late, and largely by virtue of the “information age” having ran its course.

A tacit straw pole from this diverse lot revealed a clear consensus. Almost all consider the origin or “cause” of a phenomenon to be paramount to “knowing” it. The Western physician stood out conspicuously, being primarily concerned with symptoms, or manifestations of the phenomenon instead of their causes or origins, a distinction of paramount importance.

As a corporate dropout whose thirst for knowledge never diminished, even after countless mind-altering indiscretions and equally numerous egomaniacal rages, I reflected on these perspectives to consider their deeper ramifications, but this time with a sense of calm and balance. And what I discovered took me right back to my frustrating Corporate days, a quandary I struggled to articulate in many an article and speaking engagement, but for which I never succeeded.

IT people, in large part, see knowledge like that of the physician, only concerned with the symptoms or manifestations, except in this case, the manifestation is a document, discussion thread, data, or some other form of physical content. In other words, IT has a reified view of knowledge that is umbilically linked to the document metaphor, something for which it has great difficulty seeing beyond.

But IT itself is not to blame, nor does it currently hold any guilt to something for which it is obviously ignorant of. The polemic is actually profoundly philosophical with antecedents dating back to Aristotle, the Greek philosopher who is credited with the advent of Western civilization through his doctrine of the mind/matter division, in direct opposition to the more holistic worldview that was developing in the East at the same time, some 2300 years ago.

The mind/matter division paradigm progressed through time, changing little until it experienced a scientific overhaul during the Renaissance (17^th Century) with Descartes’ proclamation that all matter is essentially static and mechanistic, the premise for which Newtonian physics is based. Eventually, this division would come to mean that humankind is superior to matter and thus should dominate it, or to put it in an IT context, “manage it.” Enter materialism. Then Freud, Jung and many of their disciples came along to show how much of the human psyche is controlled by unconscious forces, most notable for this discussion, the creative process, a substratum of knowledge that is both highly valuable and mysterious.

As I continued to ponder the essence of our philosophical underpinnings, a correlation emerged. Disciplines that concern themselves with less physical phenomena, such as psychology and philosophy, have a certain immunity to the mind/matter paradigm (and thus a greater willingness to consider Eastern perspectives, or even the revolutionary discoveries of particle physics; in both cases that no mind/matter distinction exists and moreover, the universe is both alive (dynamic) and autonomous (indeterministic), whereas those focused on physical content, such as Western medicine and IT, seem constitutionally obligated to a static, mechanistic, even predeterministic model of reality.

These obligations can be stated as follows:

1. Symptoms or manifestations of phenomena signify the beginning of knowledge. For IT, manifestations of knowledge begin and end in documents or data fields.
2. Knowledge relevancy is limited to the material world, and more specifically material phenomena. For IT, knowledge does not exist until it is manifested in a physical form by which clever algorithms of ones and zeros can manage it.
3. Material phenomena have a “static” character, meaning, they may react with other phenomena, but don’t fundamentally change by themselves. For IT, complex documents, that assemble multiple objects (of specific data and content) can change by virtue of changing the number and kind of objects linked to it, but the objects themselves remain static.

For these reasons, IT understandably refuses to view knowledge holistically, albeit unconsciously. This, of course, leads to a disinclination to seek help from other disciplines. After all, they were never needed in the past, and if knowledge begins and ends with the document or data field, why are they needed now?

To the extent a concept can be considered real, the decapitation of knowledge, and IT’s role in it, is to be taken quite literally. Yes, we’re talking about the severing of the source of knowledge from knowledge itself, the percepts, concepts, intuitions, emotions, images, symbols and other empirical data that make documents and data possible, from the documents and data themselves.

Sounds fatal, but it isn’t.

The situation is actually far more complex and indeterministic. Why? Because knowledge is a matter of consciousness and belief, for which the disciplines of psychology (study of consciousness) and philosophy (study of belief), not to mention epistemology (study of how we know what we know) are ideally suited. IT’s lack of appreciation for these antecedents only alienates itself more from the roots of the problem.

But considering its belief system, this is totally understandable. Hence the decapitation of knowledge is necessarily allegorical, existing in two separate dimensions simultaneously, just like discrete pieces of light can be viewed as either waves or particles in double slot experiments conducted by quantum physicists, so too can the decapitation of knowledge be viewed simultaneously in both a metaphysical (or pre-document, pre-data) and interdisciplinary (psychology, philosophy and epistemology) state.

Some may conclude that what has been described here, while valid, isn’t particularly relevant. But relevancy has its own irony. For instance, Western medicine, in particular the American Medical Association (AMA), is now beginning to recognize alternative medicine (and its focus on causes rather than symptoms) as a legitimate industry, not because it has capriciously decided to take seriously the origins of diseases and disorders, but because its customer base has. Indeed, the quest for truth is perhaps the most primordial knowledge of all, the kind that forever aspires for a better mousetrap. 

Recall the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), who spent billions on satellites to eavesdrop on subversives while at the same time drastically cutting its field agents (spies). The consequences are well known (911), and now the CIA is hiring spies at a breakneck pace to mitigate this cataclysmic mistake. The better mousetrap was disregarded in favor of a bigger hammer.

But while the CIA and AMA examples are good ones, they by no means predetermine how a shift in consciousness will unfold among IT culture, or Western culture in general. And while the changes taking place in the CIA and AMA have arisen from consumer pressures, not by some bureaucrat, the problem for IT is that ignorance persists from both the customer and the supplier.

So what’s a mother to do?

Ultimately, those IT people who are serious about managing knowledge, not just documents, will be forced to adopt a comprehensive, holistic understanding of knowledge. Until then, we can continue to ignore history, neglect philosophy, and shrug off unconscious forces as psychological gobbley-gook, but not without consequence. Still, as things stand today, the only facet of knowledge management that isn’t a farce is its own decapitation.

John David Balla is a former eBusiness analyst and systems integrator who now subsists as a corporate dropout in search of knowledge that brings forth healing, wisdom and freedom by bridging conventional paradigms of technology and consciousness with ancient ones. He is also Vice President of Marketing and Business Development for the Sedona, AZ-based startup, Virtual Onramp, LLC, a video asset management solutions company focused on delivering the most powerful, easy to use, and affordable Internet Video Solutions to small-to-midsize businesses. He can be reached at john@virtualonramp.com