-- JuanPabloHaddad - 21 May 2021

Welcome to the Knowledge Management Site

Knowledge Management

As part od the startegic goals for the preset and the future of the LBTO, the management is supporting a program of knowledge management to rescue and keep the intellectual capital inside the LBTO organization

What is the Knowledge Management?

The knowledge management (KM) is a formal process inside of any organization focus in :

• Use
• Create
• Identify
• Collect
• Review
• Share
• Access

The knowledge from the people, to converted as an asset for the organization, the knowledge flows has vectorial behavior, because have sense and magnitude that can flow in differents ways inside and outside the organizationas, it is call a virtuous close cycle, that crate and add value to the organizations, because each cycle is the base for the next one, meaning we need the previos knowledge to build the newone .

Figure 1: The virtuous Cycle from the knowledges Flow.

But what is the Knowledge?

This is a philoshical question many generation starting from Platon , Aristoteles are trying to explain, for sure we can go deeper in philosophy but in a easy way it can be difine as " are the cognitions beliefs confirmed and experience about an object that are conditioned for the surrounding and reinforced for the expert/Knowledgest" in a more standard definitions is a collection from the formal and informal education plus experience hands on, accumulated across the time, from the people in a determinted field or object. Even the knowledge is a problematic from the people, the organization is form by people meaning the organization's knowledge. The organization's knowledge not necessary going to be there for always, could come and go depending from the differents polices regarding to personnel and knowlwdge management from the organization.

What is the Intellectual Capital?

The intellectual capital form part of the intangibles from the organizations, in some ways form part from the character, persoality and know how, we can explain in a better way in the next figure.

Value of the Organization is:

Figure 2: Representation of the intellectual capital from the organization.

Tangible Asset

In a simple explanation, are the asset that have a finite monetary value in a usually physical form that can be transacted by exchange value to generate liquidity in a determinated period of time.

Intagible Asset

Are the totally opossite to the tangible asset, which have a theorized value like copyrights, trademarks, patents, licenses, normally tangibles and intangibles are recorded on a balance sheet but the intangibles are label as long-term assets

Human Capital

Represet the total number of persons, skils, formal education, experience, expertise area in the organization

Relational Capital

Is the way how the people interact between them, and how this benefit the entire organization, we can say represent the orgaination "Synergy"

Structural Capital

Is how the organization is structured Headquartes, departments , regional representatives, management dependance lines

Examples from value from the organization.

Some times is difficult to realize this situation but here some practical examples that can give us an idea about the accounting (Tangible asset) price v/s the sales price.

• IBM buy Lotus in a price of US$3.500 Millions accounting value was US$500 Millions.

• Yahoo’s value at 2001 was US$33.000 Millions in opposite the accounting value was US$1.470 Millions.

• Amazon.com, market value at 2001 was US$18.000 in opposite of accounting was US$2.470 Millions.

You can realize that depending of the company profile the intellectual capital can be twice or more times the accounting value (tangible asset), if this value is so important why we don't have a formal process to take care about?

Process View for the Knowledge Management

The problematic of the knowledge management is a problem from the people, but in our days the informatics and machines forces to see this problematics a process view, many experts as Niel Fleming & Gloria Ponjuán, Robert Taylor seen each process as chain value with layers in which each layer add value to the next one, we are surrounding by informatics and computing machines, that forces to look the knowledge process as shown in the figure 3.

Figure 3: Process View from Knowledge Management.

In this part the each process add value to the next one in this context can be resume as follow:

Data

Data is just a points in the univerese do not represent nothing by himself normally represent numbers or words, can be represent as temperature,velocity, demension ( time, distance, etc) concept as good, bad, strong, weak. etc. but as you can see theses do not represent nothing by himself.

Information

We can go deeper in this concept too but in simple words is the context and relation that you can get from the data, in simple words represent the " What?" examples could be, the day and time that the data was taken, during guiding close to the zenith point, during a adaptive opitics cycle, the enviorements conditions temperature, wind speed, humity ,barometric pressure etc.

Knowledge

From the process view, we can understand the knowledge as the conclusions and relations proven and confirmed from the information, in simple words represent the "How to", the knowledge can give us the key how to fix technical or any kind of problems, a good technical example could be that after to anlyze the data for deformable mirrors and taken the information about atmosferics conditions, and the issue track history the expert conclude, an hygroscopic behavior from the thin layer from the DM affect the performace of the actuator resulting in a diminish range of corrections, in this case the expert took all the data and information and extract the knowledge concluding the relation between bad performance and humity, we expect that conclusion could be in the result of a report, or in the issue track that generate that behavior, is important to mention that this conclusion needs to be avaible for all the comunity, because this knowlwdge will be knowlwdge base for a new cycle of knowledge extraction, if this conclusion is hiden or not available for the comunity the knowledge was just in that person and will be not part of the organization.

Wisdom

Normally the wisdom is a next level of abstarction, that is some way, take and relates all the knowledge that exist from a topic, the Widsom will represent the next question "why?" , "Whats is best" , "For what was done in this way" , as you can see this represent the reason why what determinated system was done in that way, in this part we expect that a new system before to be build took all the knowledge, lesson learned and best practices about a specific topic, this normally is reach it after many iterations.