COMPETENCE M-EVALUATION: AN INTEGRATED FRAMEWORK

Ricardo Colomo,

Angel Garc

ıa

Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

Legan

es, Madrid

Marcos Ruano

Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

Legan

es, Madrid

Keywords:

Mobile Business Solutions, Competence Management Systems, Skill Management, Mobile Enterprise Mana-

gement, Mobile Staff Assesment.

Abstract:

Competence Management Systems have become crucial elements for the Information Technologies strategy

in many companies. The changes originated due to the new mobility capabilities in both working environment

and technologies, have not been incorporated to any support system that integrates the competential paradigm

and mobile technology. This paper introduces a tool, based on HR-XML standard, to feed competence evalua-

tion with data or evidences that help to ﬁt performance evaluations to the actual performance of the employees.

Mobility capabilities in performance evaluation involve an innovative contribution to current Competence Ma-

nagement Systems that, due to their lack of ﬂexibility, hinder the full development of the capability to include

evidences wherever they may take place, whether it is at work, at client’s ofﬁce or in a recruitment interview.

1 INTRODUCTION

During last years, the competential paradigm has be-

come a standard for the modern Human Resources

Management (HRM). The importance and the impact

of this concept have headed the industries to develop

a set of solutions to help the introduction of Compe-

tence Management into the organizations. The work

developed in this paper describes a new competence

management tool that is based on two main characte-

ristics: mobility and cross-platform architecture. The

presented model integrates the capabilities of a tool

developed under open-source philosophy and based

on the last XML standards with one of the most po-

pular clients nowadays, the smart phone.

In order to state in a clear way the state-of-the-

art, this introduction tackles ﬁrst the deﬁnition of the

competential paradigm, secondly a description of the

Competence Management Systems and lastly an ana-

lysis of the importance of mobile systems in today’s

Information Technologies environment.

1.1 The Competential Paradigm

The concept of Competence was ﬁrst introduced at

the beginning of the 20th century (Taylor, 1911), and

has been used in the ﬁeld of human resources mana-

gement since the middle seventies, due to the works

by McClelland (McClelland, 1973).

In the context of this work, Competence is unders-

tood as the set of knowledge, skills and attitudes re-

quired in people to perform a speciﬁc task in an efﬁ-

cient way (Sagi-Vela Grande, 2004).

Competences’ main characteristic is that they com-

prise a whole set of knowledge, procedures, attitudes

and features that complement each other so that an

individual must ’know’, ’know how’ and ’know how

to be’ to face professional situations in an efﬁcient

way. They can only be deﬁned during an action, un-

der job circumstances, and that is the reason why,

for the competences development, the personal ex-

perience and the context that demands those compe-

tences are so crucial. Competences can be splitted

into two groups, technical and general competences

(Ansorena, 1996). Technical competences – inclu-

ding know-how, capability and aptitudes – are neces-

sary to perform a speciﬁc job. On the other hand, ge-

neral competences are not yet linked to a particular

task or job position, being general behavioural cha-

racteristics or capabilities of the individual, but they

do allow a cognizant job performance.

Over the last several decades, business books and

trade press have ﬂooded managers with workforce

practices each demonstrated to produce beneﬁts in at

164

Colomo R., García Á. and Ruano M. (2006).

COMPETENCE M-EVALUATION: AN INTEGRATED FRAMEWORK.

In Proceedings of the International Conference on e-Business, pages 164-168

DOI: 10.5220/0001425501640168

 SciTePress

least some applications (Curtis et al., 2001). These

practices include competence-modelling, 360

per-

formance reviews, knowledge management, compe-

tence based team-building, incentive based pay, men-

toring, meeting management and empowered work

among others. Many of them are based on compe-

tence deﬁnition and evaluation. People CMM (Curtis

et al., 2001) bases also many of its practices in com-

petence evaluation. Competence evaluations are used

for promotion issues, assignment to speciﬁc positions,

creating personal development plans, identifying rele-

vant career options or evaluating the impact of work-

force practice, among many others.

Project Human Resource Management includes the

processes required to make the most effective use

of people involved with the project (PMI Standards

Committee, 2000). This PMI Knowledge Area in-

cludes topics as recruitment based on stafﬁng skills,

retention and performance evaluation. All these acti-

vities imply, or should imply, the use of a competence

evaluation system.

1.2 Competence Management

Systems

Knowledge Management is a very close concept

to Competence Management, and technical litera-

ture (Allee, 1997) tends to generate some confusion

when analysing Knowledge Management and Com-

petence Management Systems. Competence Mana-

gement Systems focus is on employee life cycle,

covering competence requirement analysis (Lindgren

and Stenmark, 2002) and other related HRM topics,

such as personnel selection and compensation (Sagi-

Vela Grande, 2004). Competence Management is a

process that starts by deﬁning the required organiza-

tional competences, assigns them to employees, ob-

serves them through behaviour, asses them according

to organizations deﬁned values and permanently, im-

prove them (Lev

y-Leboyer, 1997).

Figure 1 presents a dynamic vision of the processes

involved in the Competence Management.

Figure 1: Competence Management Processes.

As a result of the widespread use of software in

business circles, industry has produced several tools

to support the different concurrent processes related

to Competence Management within organizations.

Section 2 contains a study on these tools.

1.3 The Importance of Mobility

In recent years two unrelated trends have stood at

the forefront of technology. First are the great im-

provements in the accessibility of information which,

driven by the Internet revolution, have made it pos-

sible to access huge amounts of information using

a traditional PC and a simple browser. Second are

the advancements in computer technologies which

reach beyond the traditional desktop environment to

areas such as mobile, or even wearable, computing.

(Carmeli and Cohen, 2001) Mobile computing has

the potential to radically transform the way people in-

teract with computers. It is motivated by the obser-

vation that computing and networking technologies

are becoming increasingly powerful and affordable

(Grimm, 2004).

Another crucial tendency that is present in enter-

prise systems is the importance of system and even

application integration. In most enterprise projects,

the majority of effort surrounds integration. Integra-

tion is mainly about extending systems and most often

it is really about extending business processes. Mo-

bile solutions extend business processes to be availa-

ble to the workforce and other participants in business

functions. It means that the employees can access

and even manipulate core business information just

when they need it the most – inmediately (Forsberg

and Sj

ostr

om, 2002).

One of the major forces in the marketplace, the

changing environment in which businesses must do

business, is speed. Everything happens faster in a

sphere where information is exchanged digitally and

people who need the information are connected to

it. Mobile technologies contribute signiﬁcantly to the

speed of business in many ways. Corporate back of-

ﬁce as well as any connected mobile worker can be

made available at the point of mission critical activity,

leading to freely exchanged interaction (Forsberg and

ostr

om, 2002).

The reminder of the paper is structured as follows.

After the introduction, that reviews the state-of-the-

art of competence evaluation, there is an analysis of

the main tendencies in the market that deal with this

particular Information Technology systems. The next

section is an approach to HR-XML, that is intended

to be the XML standard to Human Resources Mana-

gement. Section 4 describes the solution proposed in

this paper showing its architecture and the additional

contributions as regards HR-XML. Lastly, the main

conclussions and the future work are explained.

COMPETENCE M-EVALUATION: AN INTEGRATED FRAMEWORK

165

2 COMPETENCE MANAGEMENT

SYSTEMS INDUSTRY TRENDS

Human Resource Management Systems (HRMS)

have been bundled since mid 1980s within ERP (En-

terprise Resource Planning) suites. More precisely,

some vendors of this particular software specialized

towards HRMS to differentiate from their competi-

tors. Since 1990s the popularity of the competen-

tial paradigm has leaded to the irruption of new soft-

ware tools focused on the competence management,

assessment and development. The tools for suppor-

ting competence management can be classiﬁed into

the four following families:

• Large ERP Suites. These are extremely complex

applications that integrate in a modular way the

whole set of processes within the organization. At

the beginning, due to their high costs, their clients

where limitted to large companies; but the crea-

tion of new business models has encouraged some

SME (Small to Medium Enterprises) to become

part of the client portfolio of this kind of solutions.

Some examples of this kind of solutions are SAP,

Oracle/Peoplesoft and Lawson.

• SME ERP Suites. They are similar to previous,

but software is taylored to SME organizations.

Microsoft Navision and Axapta are relevant players

in this category.

• Standalone HCMS (Human Capital Management

Solutions) . Large and SME driven solutions from

vendors exclusively dedicated to Payroll & HCMS,

not providing support for other corporate busi-

ness processes (such as Suply Chain Management,

CRM, Financials, ...), but including fully sup-

port for Competence & Performance Management.

Kronos, Meta4 and Ultimate Software play signiﬁ-

cant roles in this type of solutions.

• Competence Management Solutions. Automate

Competence Management processes, in combina-

tion with Performance Management, and even-

tually providing support for some other re-

lated Competence Management process, in a

non-comprehensive, integrated way. Snowdrop,

Mindsolve and Geo Learning are relevant players

in this category.

The importance of mobility in this kind of business

applications has meant the creation of modules to al-

low access via WAP or Internet browsers. Neverthe-

less, the efective integration with productivity tools

such as Microsoft Outlook to take advantage of their

full capabilities and possibilities has not been accom-

plished. This fact is the motivation of this paper, to

introduce a model to allow the assesment of compe-

tences in the ﬁeld of organizations whose resources

perform their duties by means of mobile technolo-

gies. This circumstance allows that the data acquisi-

tion, based on competence evidences, can be carried

out not only during the usual annual competence in-

terview, but during the whole time that the employees

are performing their work activities. Due to this possi-

bility, the reliability and precission of the evaluations

and their usability will increase drastically.

3 HR-XML / SIDES

The HR-XML Consortium is an independent, non-

proﬁt organization dedicated to the development and

promotion of a standard suite of XML speciﬁca-

tions to enable e-business and the automation of hu-

man resources-related data exchanges. By develo-

ping and publishing open, freely available data ex-

change standards based on XML, the HR-XML Con-

sortium provides the means for any company to inter-

act with other companies without having to establish,

engineer, and implement many separate interchange

mechanisms (HR-XML Consortium, 2004).

SIDES is one of the recommendations published by

the HR-XML Consortium. SIDES stands for Stafﬁng

Industry Data Exchange Standards and it is a suite of

data exchange standards that offers new efﬁciencies

and cost savings for stafﬁng customers, stafﬁng sup-

pliers, and other stakeholders in the stafﬁng supply

chain (Bartkus et al., 2006).

One of the multiple parts of SIDES is a competence

schema designed to fulﬁll the following requirements

(Allen, 2004):

• The competence schema is simple and sufﬁciently

ﬂexible and generalized so that it is useful within a

variety of business contexts.

• The schema provides structure to enable compe-

tences to be easily compared, ranked, and evalu-

ated.

• The schema is capable of referencing competence

taxonomies from which competence descriptions

were taken or used.

• The competence schema is relatively simple and

compact so that it does not add to the complexity

of the process-speciﬁc schemas within which it is

used.

For the purpose of Competence M-Evaluation

the competence schema allows the integration with

other Human Resources Management Systems but, to

achieve the full capacity of competence analysis that

this framework seeks, it is necessary to build an ex-

tension of the competence schema to store some extra

information about each competence evidence. This

additional data consists on:

ICE-B 2006 - INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON E-BUSINESS

166

• the name of the resource that shows the evidence,

• the date and time when the evidence happens,

• the location where the evidence takes place,

• the relative weight assigned to the evidence and

• any document (meeting minute, software engineer-

ing document, ...) that is relevant to the evidence.

The addition of the described data implies a gua-

rantee for the adaptation of the characteristics of the

modern Competence Management to the information

systems that support it, including improved analysis

and mobility capabilities.

4 COMPETENCE

M-EVALUATION

4.1 General Description

The designed solution, called Competence M-

Evaluation, is intended to, among other functionali-

ties, support the process of documenting competence

evidences wherever they may take place: meetings at

clients’ ofﬁce, different acts and events, ...In a brief

description, it is a tool that allows the incorporation of

new features such as, personal productivity and mo-

bility, to the performance evaluation based on com-

petences. Having this purpose in mind, the solution

has been created as an open source tool which will

aggregate the set of functionalities available in the

Competence Management solutions, adapting them to

the HR-XML standard and extending this standard

to include those functionalities related to mobility.

The main functionalities provided by Competence M-

Evaluation are:

• Deﬁnition of the structure of the company: divi-

sions, departments, positions, ...

• Description of the different positions according to

competencies.

• Planning of meetings related to performance as-

sessment.

• Efective assessment of the performance of the em-

ployees using either 360

Feedback, or competence

interview, or Assessment Center.

• Collection of competence evidences outside evalu-

ation periods.

• Reporting.

4.2 Architecture

In order to provide this functionalities, the designed

architecture is based on web and it is integrated with

new mobility solutions via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or GPRS.

The main objective is to suppport the decissions re-

lated to profesional development of the workers by

means of data obtained and collected with the mini-

mum delay as possible.

The architecture of Competence M-Evaluation is

based on a set of smart clients, a server and a com-

petence database as is explained next in this section.

Figure 2 shows a graphical representation of the sug-

gested architecture.

Figure 2: Competence M-Evaluation Architecture.

Smart clients comprise both Smart Phones and

Pocket PCs. By means of this kind of clients, the

competence evaluator can capture a competence evi-

dence in a Task or in a Calendar Entry in Pocket

Outlook. Pocket Outlook was chosen because it is

present in every Smart Phone and Pocket PC, and it

is a worldwide used PIM (Personal Information Ma-

nager) with proven capabilities. The integration bet-

ween Pocket Outlook and Competence M-Evaluation

is achieved via an Pocket Outlook add-in in the Tools

menu. When selecting a Task containing information

about a competency evaluation the add-in extracts the

necessary data and introduces it into the framework.

The communication between the smart clients and

the competence server is carried out making use of the

full connection capabilities of these devices, namely:

• Wireless LAN connection through a wireless ac-

cess point.

• GPRS conection through a mobile telephony net-

work.

• Synchronization with a personal computer or lap-

top using ActiveSync software.

If there is any wireless connection, the application

can be accessed using a web browser in the smart

client. In the case that no connection is available, the

captured data can be stored in the device until it is

synchronized or a connection can be used.

The competence database stores the information re-

lated to the competence evaluations that have been

COMPETENCE M-EVALUATION: AN INTEGRATED FRAMEWORK

167

performed, the competence envidences captured and

other relevant competence information.

The purpose of the Competence Server is ﬁrst to re-

ceive the data regarding to the competence evidences

coming from the smart clients and then store it in the

competence database.

The server can also be used to generate competence

reports including:

• Personal reports about one individual, that allow

the study of the competential evolution of an in-

dividual.

• Department reports including competency infor-

mation about a work team as a whole.

• Role reports and comparissons.

• Evidence reporting that includes a detailed analysis

of the competence evidences stored in the server.

• Geography of competence reports to analyze the

distribution of competences among the different

places in which the people hold their jobs. This

kind of reports is useful to detect differences on

the competential performance of the workers de-

pending on where they are developing their duty.

The competence server has been developed under

Open Source paradigm at University environment.

5 CONCLUSIONS AND

DIRECTIONS FOR FUTURE

WORK

Mobile Business Systems will colonize companies as

Business Systems did in past decades. In the indus-

trial and services sphere where we live, it is more and

more important the human capital. The management

of this kind of resources is based on the correct assess-

ment of the performance of the knowledge workers.

The proposal exposed in this paper combines the most

outstanding and modern ideas of the ﬁelds on which

it is based: human capital management through com-

petencies management feeded on the systematic col-

lection of competency evidences. This brings us the

possibility of performing this collection anywhere in

a discreet and integrated way and the capacity of sha-

ring that knowledge with the appropriate stakeholders

in the company.

The proposed future work is the development of

different pratical applications. First, it would be de-

sirable the adaptation of the developed client to make

it compatible with the biggest number of mobile de-

vices in the market as possible. Second, the deve-

lopment of particular solutions for different kinds of

workers, applying and suggesting performance mea-

surement templates based on the technical literature,

such as Software Engineer or Project Manager, whose

competential proﬁles are fully deﬁned in curricula ef-

forts and role descriptions.

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