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96 December 2005/Vol. 48, No. 12 COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM
•PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL KLOSE
COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM December 2005/Vol. 48, No. 12 97
Assessing the contribution of a technical skills management tool
for supporting organizational learning.
PRACTICAL KNOWLEDGE
MANAGEMENT TOOL USE
IN A SOFTWARE CONSULTING COMPANY
By Torgeir Dingsøyr, Hans Karim Djarraya, and Emil Røyrvik
Tools for managing technical skills are used in many companies, but
there has been little discussion about how such tools are used in practice. We
report here on different types of actual usage in a medium-size software
consulting company. We expected such tools to be used for allocating resources
to new projects and for searching for competence to solve problems, but also
observed two other types of usage: identifying new project opportunities, and
upgrading skills. This multitude of uses enables learning practices and
motivates tool use both at individual and company levels, which are
crucial to enable organizational learning.
98 December 2005/Vol. 48, No. 12 COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM
Software engineering is a knowledge-intensive task,
where it is of critical importance to have skilled
employees. Knowledge management (KM) [5] has
gained much attention among practitioners and
researchers in software engineering [1, 10]. There are
two basic strategies for ensuring employees are skilled
[8]: Either you focus on codifying relevant knowl-
edge, or you count on communication between peo-
ple who have relevant knowledge—what is called
personalization. Kankanhalli et al. [9] give examples
of groups of companies that have chosen different
strategies, and discuss the role of IT for supporting
the strategies. In this article, we seek to further discuss
one type of IT support for a personalization strategy,
namely the use of tools to identify and manage the
technical skills of employees. Such systems are some-
times referred to as expert directories, people-finder
systems, or company-internal yellow pages.
We can divide skills in two broad groups: techni-
cal skills, which include knowledge about technol-
ogy issues; and soft skills, involving competencies of
a more personal and social type, like organizing and
handling complexities in project work, enabling
people to contribute their resources, and customer
communication.
It is important to get the right people with the
appropriate soft and technical skills to work on a soft-
ware development project. Many companies have
developed KM tools to assist them in the tasks of
managing technical skills by surveying what kind of
knowledge people have and creating an index of it.
We will refer to the process of indexing and making
this type of information available as skills manage-
ment. Here, our focus is on technical skills.
There are many software tools for managing skills.
For example, companies that offer jobs on the Inter-
net usually have a database where job-seekers can
store their competence profiles. The contents of such
tools can be: “Knowledge profiles, skill profiles, and
personal characteristic profiles that define subjective
assessments of the knowledge, skills, and personal
traits required for the different work roles” [12]. In
order to have such a working system, a company must
select a set of skills it is interested in, have a system for
evaluating the employees, and make this information
available to different user groups.
We wanted to know more about how tools for
managing skills are used in a specific organization.
What purposes do such tools serve, and do they sat-
isfy needs other than the expected use in resource allo-
cation? In order to examine these questions, we
interviewed 14 developers, managers, and project
managers in an ethnographic study at Computas, a
consultancy company with approximately 150
employees that develops knowledge-based software.
The company has no traditional departments, but is
organized in projects and a set of processes, where
KM is considered to be one important process.
We will describe their skills management tool, and
what different types of usage we found (note that we
do not look at the technical implementation of skills
management systems, but refer readers with such
interests to other literature [2, 11]). A more thorough
description of our findings is available in [7], and
studies of usage of other KM tools in the same com-
pany can be found in [3] and [6].
THE SKILLS MANAGER TOOL
The skills manager is a part of the intranet at Com-
putas, and every employee has access to it. Users can
select a skill from a taxonomy of approximately 250
different technical skills, related to the core compe-
tencies of the company. When a particular skill is
selected, users can find which of seven skill levels
people have, from “expert” to “irrelevant.” In addi-
tion to indicating their skill level, people also indi-
cate which level they want to have in the future (see
the figure on the next page). When viewing skills,
details are shown in black if people are at the level
they would like to be, red if this is a topic they do
not wish to work on in the future, or green if they
want to develop their skills in this area.
Employees are prompted in the front page of the
intranet to evaluate themselves when new skills are
introduced in the tool. They are also told to update
the information when they have completed a project.
Anyone can suggest new skills to the tool, which
will be included by the manager of the “competence
center” process.
A VARIETY OF USAGES
When we think of usage of skills management tools,
we typically think of resource allocation and search-
ing for experts to solve problems. But when we
interviewed people at Computas, we found four
major ways of using the skills management tool, and
we found issues that broadened our understanding
of the usage of the tool.
Resource allocation. Concerning the classical
usage of skills management tools, resource allocation,
we found evidence of such practice. As one new
employee said: “Contrary to a lot of other companies
that use such a system, here at Computas we really use
the system for resource planning.” Another comment
is quite similar: “I think that the skills manager is a
useful tool, but a tool that still has got a lot of poten-
tial when it comes to practical use. Those responsible
for resource management already use the tool a lot in
their daily work.” A third Computas employee also
comments on the skills manager as an important tool
for resource allocation, and indicates the dynamics
whereby new skills are added to the tool: “The tools I
use the most I think are…the competence-block-
manager [another part of Computas’ KM system,
used for organizing internal learning courses] and the
skills manager. I’m responsible for the content in
many databases, and partly the skills management
base. And the skills manager is a tool that is
very important…for the resource allocation
process…Therefore, many employees come up with
suggestions on new content, new elements, in the
skills database.”
Searching for competence to solve problems.
Often developers need to acquire knowledge on some
issue where they have little experience themselves. One
developer describes a “short term” usage in solving
problems: “Of course, when I wonder if there is any-
one who can help me with something, I look up in the
skills management system to see if anyone has the
knowledge that I need.” When you get a list of people
with a certain competence, you can email one or all of
them. Or you can just print a list of people and ask
them yourself, as some developers prefer. Of course,
this depends on people rating themselves in an honest
way. According to one developer, “Some overrate
themselves and other underrate themselves strongly.”
The last problem can be termed “resistance to be
known as an expert” [4]. Developers indicating exper-
tise in one area risk being allocated to that kind of
project in the future instead of other, perhaps more
intellectually challenging ones. The possibility of indi-
cating a future desired skill level is a means to prevent
this resistance in this company. Thus, the tool signals
not only what an employee is skilled at, but also top-
ics he wants to work more with in the future.
Another developer is critical of the categories of
competence in the skills management tool: “when it
comes to more detailed things, like who can in fact
write a computer program, and who can find a solu-
tion—you do not find that there.”
In this usage domain we
found both short-term and
long-term types of usage. The
former is where people use the
tool to find others in the com-
pany that know something
about a specific problem at
hand. The latter is a usage
where people over time increase
their overall insight into what
core competencies exist in the
company.
When we look at the long-
term usage, one developer says
he finds a group of people that
knows something about a sub-
ject in the skills management
tool, and asks them questions by
email. But usually only a few
people bother to answer: “If you
have asked questions about SQL
to 10 gurus, and it is always the
same two that answer, you start
to go directly to them and talk;
you learn after a while who it is
any use to attempt to get infor-
mation from.”
Finding projects and exter-
nal marketing. Another usage
of the tool is for the sales department. One manager
said that “Even sales can use it [the skills management
system], to find new directions.” That is, to find what
types of projects that suit the company well; combin-
ing strategic and competence development needs.
Another usage could be to use the tool as a testimony
of the organization’s skill level. For Computas, as a
company focusing on knowledge-based solutions, the
skills manager tool is also a way to show that the com-
pany is “taking its own medicine.”
Skills upgrading. At Computas, people are allo-
cated to projects on the basis of defined technical
skills in the skills manager tool. In this way, people
position themselves for future projects by indicating
what knowledge they want to develop as a part of
COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM December 2005/Vol. 48, No. 12 99
The skills manager tool,
showing employee skill
levels in “Testing and
testing techniques” and
current and desired skill
levels for an employee.
their career plan. And it is “natural to ask for an
update on competencies when a project is finished.”
One employee sees the skills manager in terms of
intellectual capital: “[We can] say that we have that
many man-months with C++ competence, or Java,
and we see that there is an increase in this compe-
tence, and then we can evaluate that.” And by stating
what they want to learn about in the future, people
can develop their competence by working on rele-
vant projects.
IMPLICATIONS
The study shows how a skills manager tool can be
practically utilized in a variety of usages. Some
implications of the findings include:
• The design and user interface of the tool is sim-
ple and flexible, as a Web-based system with
update requests on the intranet. It invites the
people with the knowledge and the needs to sug-
gest topics and contents to be rated. This leads to
appropriate levels of detail in the competency
areas. The topics should not be too detailed, and
not too general.
• A broader span of usage functionality spurs util-
ity. An important factor here is that the tool is
advantageous at the individual level (employees
get recognition for their skills, and sell themselves
for future project assignments), at the project
level (resource allocation), and at the process level
(strategic management of core competencies).
• The double individual/company utility of the
tool represents a wide scope of applicability, and
is apparent to users. This motivates them to
update skills information regularly. Updating is a
common challenge for KM systems.
• The tool is not designed for employees to get
direct access to all relevant information on differ-
ent topics. The skills manager is in tune with the
personalization school of KM, which seeks to
connect people and problems, tasks, and occa-
sions. This strategy enables sharing of more sub-
tle forms of knowledge, for example tacit
knowledge.
• The tight integration of the tool with the daily,
practical project work for most of the roles in the
company ensures its use, usefulness, and success.
CONCLUSION
When we began our process of interviewing people
at Computas about how they were using the skills
management tool component of the company’s KM
system, we expected the tool to be used for resource
allocation and for short-term problem solving. We
found that the tool use in problem solving also has
a long-term effect in letting employees know who to
ask next time. Further, the skills management tool is
used for identifying new project opportunities and
to support skills upgrading. The tool supports learn-
ing practices and motivates use at both an individual
and company (projects and processes) level. This
double capability enables integration and knowledge
exchanges both vertically (between organizational
levels) and horizontally (between individuals and
projects). The skills manager thus supports processes
that drive organizational learning—an increasingly
recognized factor for competitive advantage.
Some employees are critical of how people evaluate
their skills, others questioned the level of detail on the
available skills, and yet others felt that information on
more soft skills was lacking. Overall, we determined
the usage of the tool is very much implanted in the
daily work of the organization, and supports a multi-
tude of functions.
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Torgeir Dingsøyr (torgeir.dingsoyr@sintef.no) is a research
scientist with SINTEF Information and Communication Technology
in Trondheim, Norway.
Hans Karim Djarraya (hkd@computas.com) is a principal
engineer with Computas in Oslo, Norway.
Emil Røyrvik (emil.royrvik@sintef.no) is a research scientist with
SINTEF Technology and Society in Trondheim, Norway.
© 2005 ACM 0001-0782/05/1200 $5.00
c
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