Veritas? What is Veritas?

The question posed in week 2 was quite interesting. As an organization do you want to work on “knowledge” management or “truth” management? I think the debate that broke out in class basically crystallized the argument and to me begs the essential question: “When and how does knowledge become truth?” During class I brought up the idea that knowledge is not as important as truth. I used the example of the common “knowledge” 500 years ago that the world was flat. However the truth was very different. The history of man is filled with early recordings of knowledge. Some of it has stood the test of time, others have been refined, evolved, and changed. Those recordings that have stood the test of time have come to be known as truth. But truth has a certain subjectivity to it. Truth still needs to be proclaimed as such by some authority. Scientifically a theory becomes law when the authority (usually empirical data) consistently produces a similar result. But who is the authority on proclaiming truth in an organization? We’ve read knowledge management documents that help to describe certain business processes, but whose to say those processes are true? Is the authority in this situation the results produced by certain processes? What if an organization arrives to a goal in a project yet uses the most inefficient processes known to man? Are those processes now gospel, simply because of their results? And therein lies the problem, very few pieces of information inside an organization can ever be empirically tested to carry the weight of truth. And if that’s the case, then information can never be promoted further than knowledge. But ultimately it helps us to realize that the real goal or knowledge management is to turn your KMS from a knowledge base, into a pillar of truth..