Part 3: Managing Competence

An essential competitive factor for many companies, consultants as well as larger industrial companies, are to be able to optimize the use of competence within the organization. To be able to take advantage of the competence within a company the requirement is partly that it is known and partly that there is incitement for being able to use it. A problem today is that many companies "do not know what they know and what they are capable of".

To be able to match competence with customer problems and the market need, and to support manning of projects with the right competence, one needs to know how the company's "competence map" looks like. This implies that companies need to work with their competence as a main resource in a more active way. There are many different ways to approach this problem: competence mapping, competence exchanges, competence markets and markets are some of the phenomena that have been tested.

In the future one can imagine that participants in a project is gathered from their competence need with the help from different types of competence descriptions like i.e. "CV-databases", competence- and interest profiles etc. In case of a lack of resource one can clearly identify what competence that is missing and by this create incitements to build competence for individual members. This implies a focus on the questions about competence, use of competence and the relation between existing competence and desired/inquired competence. How can incitement be created to generate competence and to "direct" it towards future requirement? How will effective competence development be accomplished on the basis of the co-workers daily work? Which instruments are available to follow up the quality of competence development?

A big challenge for most companies is how to increase the effect/benefit of the co-workers competence. The engine in every knowledge-based organization is the co-workers and their ability to exploit their own and others competence. How can one preserve the occurring possibilities in the interaction between co-workers? How do one create value-adding interactions? How can one strengthen the individual co-worker's ability to accomplish complex assignments? How can one increase the ability to successfully handle new assignments?

Problem issues:

• How describe, represent and visualize competence in organisations (knowledge mapping)? How facilitate effective competence searching?
• How to manage competence development (knowledge management)? What mechanisms and incitements can be used to manage competence development towards future requirements? How can one make competence development more efficient? How can one shorten the time of development in competence?
• - How to strengthen the ability of the competence worker (knowledge empowerment)? How create a culture where it is obvious to share ones knowledge? What incentives can be used to accomplish active knowledge sharing and interaction between knowledge workers?

In this part of the project methods, forms of work and IT-solutions will be studied and developed for the problems above. What is state-of-the-art? How does it work in reality? How do the problems differ between different types of organisations?

Experience within the project:

• EMW: "Knack", competence stock exchange
• Guide: "kompetenstorget", Guide intranet, Guide Knowledge Management Network, competence compass
• Frontec: the compass
• Volvo: Agents with definable profiles of competence and interest.

Method:

• Workshops with exchange of experience
• Literature studies
• Case studies
• Prototype development

Participants:

Viktoria, Volvo, EMW, Guide, Frontec

Results:

• State-of-the-art reports with examples of best practice
• Methods and models for competence development
• Work practice for active knowledge management
• IT-support for mapping and exposing of competence, design guidelines.
• IT-prototypes for competence searching
• Conference papers