A design theory for dynamic competencies mapping systems

Abstract

This paper describes a research in progress that addresses the design problem of dynamically mapping competencies with IT. In turbulent markets, companies face the problem of an expansive maintenance of competencies inventory. They have to choose between maintaining those systems and manage new knowledge or abandoning them and risk being less competitive. Using IS design theory [1], we’ll try to identify meta requirement, products and process requirements and testable hypothesis in order to develop an IT tool able to classify old and new competencies in a dynamic way. The hypothesis will be tested comparing a real competence inventory (elaborated by ISFOL, an Italian public entity) with an inventory coming from an IT tool designed with this methodology. These activities are planned in three phases. As first step, we extract from ISFOL database a list of competencies required for financial organizational roles. The second step is to hypothesize which sources could provide these competencies in order to verify extracting competencies from the "corpus” articulated in those sources. The third steps of this process will be to compare ISFOL skills inventory for financial industry and the inventory that comes from a DCMS (Dynamic Competencies Mapping System).