Using the document metaphor as a synonym for knowledge effectively decapitates the concept of knowledge itself. All the while, the perpetrators—the Information Technology (IT) vendors—grumble about their inability to shake the information management stigma. IT analysts provide some relief but not enough to reclaim knowledge in a broader context.  To do so requires nothing short of taking a hiatus from Western civilization.

Perhaps it’s because I am a former analyst, who before that was a systems integrator, that I couldn’t see the IT industry as I do today. My personal experience translated into a quite natural sympathy with the vendor, even while I wrote as an analyst. As such, I saw my work and the vendor’s as symbiotic; my job was to justify IT, which to me was synonymous with the IT vendor. Quite unwittingly, I subordinated my own contributions and those of my peers as noble bootstrapping to this end.  But with time comes clarity.

The IT industry is more of a loose coalition than a single body, comprising two major factions. There’s the vendor (those who develop hardware and software products)/ integrator (those who install and implement them typically with other existing or “legacy” system) faction, who together are primarily concerned with deploying solutions or applications that makes distributing content, be it documents or whatever the user is comfortable calling it, more efficient.

It maintains a tenuous alliance with the other faction comprised of analysts, academicians and consultants, who address issues such as business process, corporate culture, cognitive dissonance and other human-based concerns. While there is indeed some degree of symbiosis, the two minds are often of different ilk. Here, the 80/20 rule applies: The IT vendor is 80 percent focused on technological and 20 percent focused on humanistic issues, whereas the IT analyst is just the opposite. The problem is that, while the focus is different, the box is the same.

In his adventures with Mexican sorcerer don Juan, Carlos Castaneda, a talented anthropologist from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and author of several books on the teachings of his mentor, spent over ten years documenting the oral traditions of don Juan’s sorcery, a strange and enchanted existence fueled by perceptual knowledge and the methods used to summon its power. Castaneda’s findings were nothing short of groundbreaking in that most anthropologists have since become convinced that sorcery is indeed real and not colloquial “voodoo.”

So how could this possibly benefit IT? No doubt, Castaneda’s contemporaries asked similar questions (pertaining to their field) when he returned to the protective gates of the university to report his findings. Yet it’s unlikely even Castaneda fully understood the implications of his data (that were collected during a series of peyote-induced states). In effect, he had discovered the anthropological equivalent of the quantum world. In other words, how we “perceive” reality alters reality itself! Inanimate objects are not dead after all; we affect them based on how we perceive them as corroborated in countless experiments conducted by quantum physicists over the past 100 years.

Now this all seems quite fascinating, and indeed points to an outmoded Cartesian logic for which most institutions still cling to, including IT. But this is nothing new, especially if we take into account that  Max Planck discovered quantum physics in 1905. Even today, the philosophical and psychological (not to mention physical) implications of this counterintuitive paradigm are by no means status quo.

What’s key for IT is that perceptions are not only real, as both anthropology and quantum physics have demonstrated, they are also physical, stored in the brain and thus can be retrieved, reused, redistributed and repurposed—all very familiar concepts to IT.

In fact, perceptions represent a large portion of conscious activity. We do know from research conducted by neurobiologist Franz Seitelberger, that of the one billion bits of information the brain processes per second, only 100 bits manifest consciously. In other words, the odds of brain activity becoming “conscious” are a miniscule one in ten million! By virtue of perceptions being among this “conscious minority,” it seems we would want to “learn” all we could from them, especially when we consider their “collaborative” influences on reality itself.

In his book, “Essentialism: A Hierarchical Theory of Epistemology,” Gale Richard Walker elegantly summarized the problem this way: “Wise men and women have attempted for millennia to round up the human experience into a coherent scheme of ideas. These noble attempts have produced a trillion words on paper. But most of it has ended in vain, merely substituting one wrong method of knowing for another.” Strange as it seems, perceptions can also contain methods in themselves, like don Juan’s “man of knowledge” ideal, a lengthy and almost unattainable rite of passage to which each initiate has to first ally and then vanquish themselves from four enemies of knowledge: fear, clarity, power and old age, making our concerns seem frivolous.

According to don Juan, perception is fueled by “intent.” How we perceive reality is a willful act, not a passive one; that is, we choose our reality, even if we do so unconsciously. He also identified how intent itself is an “intelligence” that supersedes the perceptual world in the literal sense. He uses the word “university” as an example since it was most dear to Castaneda’s heart, of using intent to create something that cannot be perceived by the senses—what most of us would call a “concept.”

The point, according to don Juan, is that knowledge is fueled by intent, which then bifurcates into percepts and concepts. Of the two, percepts are more powerful because they are pure manifestations, whereas concepts are “interpretations” or approximations of reality. Following this line of logic, the kind of knowledge IT addresses is primarily interpretive, second-hand, abstract information, what most of us would call “facts.” Or as Nietzsche put it so astutely two centuries ago, “There are no facts, only interpretations.”

In either case, “conceptual acquisition” is currently a hit or miss proposition, relying entirely on whether concepts are implicitly or explicitly contained in documents (from an IT perspective).

The teachings of don Juan illustrate vast areas of knowledge that IT (as well as all of Western civilization) neglects, namely the perceptual world in general, any methods that encompass it and the intent that fuels it (except, of course, when intent is used to fuel a concept, and then only under certain conditions). Again, philosophical biases show their inadequacies. In those cases where we are willing to consider knowledge abstractly, we favor the concept at the expense of the percept. We do so in the same way we favor the document over the ethereal, the physical over the metaphysical. One appears more real or relevant than the other.  

However, as we consider these maxims in a wider context, knowledge itself becomes paradoxical. Don Juan’s perceptual world becomes more concrete and our world of facts, based largely on the outdated Newtonian physics of a static universe that reacts like billiard balls, becomes more abstract and, under quantum scrutiny, even illusory.

Now of course, the secular world isn’t going to shift its consciousness based on sound argumentation alone. Still it does show that the perceptual world is the new frontier for knowledge mining, and being that it is the purest form of knowledge, the unprecedented yields will be sufficient incentive. But not until IT gets over its document bias, will it be in a position to overcome its conceptual bias. By that time, its inherent limitations will present another paradox. Indeed, progress can be quite a nonlinear experience, as both quantum physic and Eastern thought have demonstrated. Now it’s IT’s turn to experience this strange reality.

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