Skills Management as Knowledge Technology in a Software Consulting Company

Software Consultancy Company

Torgeir Dingsøyr1, Emil Røyrvik2

1Department of Computer and Information Science,

Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Currently at: Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering,

Sauerwiesen 6, 7661 Kaiserslautern, Germany

dingsoyr@idi.ntnu.no

2SINTEF Industrial Management,

7491 Trondheim, Norway emil.royrvik@indman.sintef.no

Abstract. This paper presents a skills management system in a medium-sized software consulting company, and how it is used. We found four different types of usage: Searching for competence to solve problems, allocating resources, finding areas for new projects, and to develop competence. Most people in the company seem to regard this tool as useful, both for themselves, and for the company as a whole.

Keywords: Skills Management, Knowledge Management, Software Engineering.

1 Introduction

Software engineering is knowledge work, where it is critical to have employees who know about different technology issues, as well as project planning and customer communication and needs. A major management trend in recent years has been programs to manage the knowledge of the employees better; to record and diffuse, and support the creation of new knowledge in a company. This is often referred to as knowledge management [1-3]. Knowledge management has already in some forms and forums acquired the status of a so-called fad. We will not go into that here, just state that we see knowledge management as a potentially fruitful field still in its infancy, emerging at the confluence of organizational learning, the resource bases view of the firm and the new technologies for managing knowledge [4]. We may also add that knowledge management is not a new activity invented lately by organizational theorists, but has taken place at all times within all purposeful collectives such as families, tribes, societies, monasteries, universities and business firms.

We often say that knowledge manifests itself in two types: tacit and explicit. By tacit knowledge we mean knowledge that a human is unable to express [5], but is

guiding the behavior of the human. For example how to ride a bike is something that is difficult to express, which you have to learn by trial and failure. Another example of tacit knowledge is the struggle of Japanese engineers to make a machine that bakes bread. According to [6], there were several trials to construct such a machine, but the bread simply did not taste as well as bread made by normal bakers. The company NEC decided to send people to a local baker to see how the process of making bread was carried out, to find what went wrong in their attempt. The researchers returned with new insight on the baking process, and later was able to replicate this in their machine. This is an example of tacit knowledge that is difficult to transfer by other means than looking at someone executing the process of baking bread, trying it out yourselves, imitating and experiencing - often referred to as socialization processes. An example from software engineering is the knowledge needed to estimate the size of a module in a software package – this is knowledge that is very difficult to describe. Explicit knowledge is knowledge that we can explicitly use and represent to ourselves and others through some form of verbal or non-verbal language - represented for example in reports, books, talks, or other communication.

Many computer systems exist for supporting collection and diffusion of explicit knowledge in companies, and many knowledge management programs exist to help people convert tacit knowledge to explicit, in order to make them more transferable to others. But another and cheaper possibility is not to try to represent the knowledge that people have, explicitly, in writing it down, but rather to survey such knowledge and make an index of it, a kind of company-internal “yellow pages”. The process of surveying and indexing and making this type of information available, we will refer to as skills management.

There exists lots of software tools for managing skills – for example, companies that offer jobs on the Internet usually have some kind of database where you as a job-seeker can store your competence profile (see for example www.stepstone.com). Commercial tools for this purpose are available, like SkillScape1 and SkillView2. 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 within the function” [7]. The purpose of using such tools is mostly to: • Find staff with the right skills to new projects.

• Find people who know something that you need to know.

In order to have such a working system, the company needs to select a set of skills that they are interested in, have a system for evaluating the employees, and make this information available to different user groups.

Here, we are interested in knowing more about how such systems for managing skills are used in a specific organization. Other interesting issues, such as cost and benefit of such systems, and how they are introduced in companies are beyond the scope of this paper. Also, we do not look at technical implementation of skills management systems, but refer readers with such interests to other literature [8].

12

See www.skillscape.com. See www.skillview.com.

We have studied one company using ethnographic methods, and present the different views on - and characteristics of - a skills management tool that is in use. First, we discuss what research method that has been applied, then introduce the company, present findings on the skills management system, and discuss them in section 3, and finally conclude in section 4.

2 Methods

In this study, we have used a research method inspired by ethnography: A method for collecting information for a case study that has been used by anthropologists. It is described as “the art and science of describing a group or culture” [9]. The main element of ethnographic research is the fieldwork: the researcher should get into the environment that she is intending to study, and gradually start to collect data. Another key element in ethnography is to rely on multiple data sources: Participant observation, questionnaires, interviews, projective techniques, videos, pictures, and written material.

The analysis in ethnography is usually concentrated around triangulation – to set different sources of information up against each other, to find patterns of thought or behavior in the community of study. Other methods include drawing organizational charts, making flowcharts of processes that happen, setting up matrices to compare and contrast data, and to use statistics.

Ethnography has been used to some extent within the Computer Science subfield Information Systems, as well as in Software Engineering. Some researchers have used ethnography and discourse analysis to investigate how practitioners apply quality procedures [10]. Others have written about applying ethnographic methods in the construction of information systems and to analyze the development itself [11]. This paper also gives a good introduction to ethnography. 2.1 Collecting Data

The study here is a subpart of a larger study about the use of knowledge management systems in software consulting companies, and also a part of a large four year action research program on several knowledge-intensive business firms (KIBS), where we here have limited the available data to issues related to skills management. We used multiple methods to collect data, and in addition to information gathered in informal settings of participant observation and also in meetings, and have used the following data sources:

• Interviews – we used semi-structured interviews with open-ended questions to

allow the respondents to speak more freely of issues they felt were important, and to let the interviewer develop the interviews over time. We interviewed a project manager and three people participating in a project, the person responsible for knowledge management, three other management representatives: persons responsible for business consulting, international operations, and the internal competency center. We also interviewed six people who had won an internal

•

prize for sharing their knowledge with others, making it a total of 14 interviews. The interviews were recorded on MiniDisc and then transcribed. The transcripts were sent back to the people who had been interviewed for corrections or further comments. We got feedback from around 50% of the people interviewed, mostly minor corrections. The interviews were done in Norwegian, and the citations that are used in this paper are our translation of what was said.

Screenshots – we gathered screen-shots from different parts of the skills management system.

2.2 Analyzing the Data: “Coding”

From the data we have through analyses seen some patterns emerge, and thus constructed categories on behalf of these patterns.

3 Results and Discussion

First, let us briefly introduce the company that we collected material from: We leave the company anonymous, and refer to it as Alpha.

Alpha is a consulting company, which develops knowledge-based systems for a variety of customers. In the annual report for 1999, they state that their vision is to ”make knowledge sharing in organizations more effective, and thereby contribute so that knowledge is refined and used to achieve the organization’s goal”. The company has around 150 employees, and some of them are working in their customer’s offices. The company is organized in projects and processes, where knowledge management is considered to be one important process.

When we now go on to discuss the usage of the skills management system, we have on the basis of the patterns that emerged divided the usage into four categories, some with subcategories. From the interviews we see that the system can be used for: • Searching for competence to solve problems • Resource allocation

• Finding projects and external marketing • Competence development

Now, we discuss each of these uses below: 3.1 Searching for competence to solve problems

The developers often need to know something about a topic that they are not very skilled in themselves. We can then divide between two types of usage of the skills management system. First, people use it to find other people in the company that knows something about a specific problem that they have to solve – “short term usage”. Second, the people increase their overall insight in what the core competencies in the company are, what we can call more “long term” usage.

Let us look at the short term usage first: One developer says: “it happens [that I use it], if I suddenly have a specific problem in an area that I do not know much about, then it sometimes helps to go in there and find someone who knows about it. I have in fact done that once...” Another developer seems to use it more often: “Of course, when I wonder if there are anyone who can help me with something, I look up in the skills management system to see if anyone has the knowledge that I need”. In Fig. 1, we show a screenshot of the skills management system, which gives an overview of skills on object-oriented development. Here, you can also e-mail people who have a required competence in one area. Or you can just print a list of people and ask them yourself, as another developer is usually doing: “Then I find a list, and look at what level they have [...] and then I go around in the house and ask them”. Of course, this depends on that people rate themselves in a honest way. One developer used the skills management system to find people, but after asking the believed “experts” found that “I did not get the answers that I needed, so I had to go to someone else. So, it is very dependent on that people update it right. And to describe a level is not that easy, so some overrate themselves and other underrate themselves strongly”. Another developer is critical to the categories of competence in the skills management system: “what you can get information about now is if someone knows about web – and that contains quite a lot! ...maybe it is not that general, but not too far off. It is based on the core competency areas of the company, but when it comes to more detailed things, like who that in fact can write a computer program, and who that can find a solution – you do not find that there”.

When we look at more long-term usage, we do not find so much material in our interviews. One developer, however, often finds a group that knows something about a subject on the skills management system, and asks them questions by e-mail. But “if it then happens that you have asked questions about SQL to ten guru’s, and it is always the same two that answers, then it happens that you start to go to them and talk. You learn after a while who it is any use to attempt to get anything out of”. 3.2 Resource allocation

IBM has a worldwide very up-to-date resource allocation management system. At a seminar with David Snowden at IBM’s Knowledge Management Institute, it sounded a bit like the system used at Alpha. Every employee updates their skills and competencies and their available time, so that project managers globally can place queries on when and what type of people they need to staff their project. However, Snowden told us how he and all the managers he knew staffed their projects in practice. Snowden called up some of his good friends in the company, people he trusted, and discussed with them who would be the right people for the new project. When they agreed upon the names, they got all the professional details of

Fig. 1. A part of a Screenshot from a web browser that shows people with different competence levels in Object-Oriented Development. The names of the people have been made up, and company information has been removed. On the left, you have a browsable list of competence categories.

those people and when they had spare time. Then they placed a detailed tailored query into the system. Of course, the system chewed out only the names that they already had chosen. And everybody is happy. The managers get the people they want and the system seems to work perfect – and it gets the highest credits on satisfaction ratings! When confronted with this story at Alpha, one of the managers of internal knowledge management said: “This is not the situation at Alpha!”

Let us therefore see how some of the employees comment on this issue. In our empirical material from Alpha, we can see some patterns of the practical uses of the skills management system, in terms of resource allocation.

As one newly employed said: “Contrary to a lot of other companies that uses such a system, here at Alpha we really use the system for resource planning.” Another comment is on the same track: “I think that the skills manager is a useful tool, but a tool that still has got a lot of potential when it comes to practical use. Those who do the resource-management they already use the tool a lot in the daily resource allocation work.”

A third Alpha employee comments on the skill manager as both an important tool for resource allocation, but also for the strategic development of the company:

“The tools I use the most I think is [...] the competence-block-manager [another part of the knowledge management system in the company which is used to organize company-internal courses] and the skills-manager. Definitely! 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 both for the resource allocation process [...] Therefore, many employees come up with suggestions to new content, new elements, in the skills database.”

3.3 Finding projects and external marketing

Another usage of the system is for the sales department. One manager said that “Even sales can use it [the skills management system], to think out new directions to go in”. That is, to find what types of projects that suits the company well. We can also think of another usage that we did not hear from anyone (probably because we did not talk to people in the sales department) – namely to use the system as external marketing; as “proof” of a highly skilled workforce. 3.4 Competence development

Concerning the development of competencies at Alpha, the skills manager also seems to play a part. “The problem with all of our systems is that they function only to the degree that they are used. [Systems] like the Skills Manager depends on everybody to update it often and objectively. That could be solved by work-process support. Skills update could be a natural part of the closing of a project, for example by updating the involved competencies – those that have been in use during the project. You are today allocated to projects on the basis of what you have in the Skills Manager. There we have views devoted to people with free time and the competence required in the project. When you are allocated to a project on the basis of a competence profile, then there is also knowledge in the system about which competencies it is expected to be used in the project, and therefore it would be natural to ask for an update on those competencies when the project is finished.”

Another employee sees the Skills manager in light of intellectual capital. “Such tools are very good indicators for accounting intellectual capital. You are able to see in the long term what kind of competencies we will need, evaluate it, and compare it to what competence we already have in the firm, and then say that we have that many man months with C++ competence, or Java, and we see that there is an increase in this compentence, and then we can evaluate that.”

In the skills management system at Alpha, the employees can use this tool to state what they want to learn about in the future, not only what they know now. In that way, people can develop their competence by working on relevant projects.

4 Conclusions

We have interviewed people in a software consultancy company about how they are using a skills management system, which is a part of the company’s knowledge management system. We found that the tool is in use for “problem solving” in that people use it to get to know about who knows what in the company. Most people say that they use it to solve problems on a short term, but some also say that the system let them know who to ask the next time. Further, the skills management system is in use for resource allocation, to find new projects for the company and to support competency development.

Some are critical to how people rate their competency and to the type of skills that one is able to evaluate oneself in. However, it seems that most people see it as useful both for themselves and for the company as a whole.

Acknowledgement

We are grateful to Reidar Conradi at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology for comments on this paper.

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