Towards an integrating architecture for competence management

In companies, competence management involves several heavy processes that we have categorised in four classes: competence identification, competence assessment, competence acquisition, and competence usage. Competence management, comprising the management of knowledge about competence, can take advantage from the knowledge engineering techniques to support the mentioned process categories. The paper on the one hand describes how the knowledge engineering techniques proposed in the literature can be used to support the various competence management processes. On the other hand, based on the authors' previous work on competence management information systems (CRAI approach), the paper provides a critical discussion of the mentioned knowledge engineering techniques: i.e. their strengths, benefits and weaknesses in the context of the process categories are carried out. Then, it proposes an integrating architecture for competence management. A running example is used throughout the paper to better illustrate knowledge techniques and their applications to the competence management. (C) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.