Abstract
In order to acquire more business opportunities, by adapting to new and changing market conditions, organizations face many strategic and operational challenges; one of them is related to identification and management of their competencies. Broadly speaking, competency management is the way in which organizations coordinate and manage the competencies of the corporation, groups, and individuals. It has the primary objective to identify and continuously maintain competencies, according to the objectives of the corporation. A competency is a way to put into the practice some knowledge, know-how, and also attitudes, inside a specific context. Identification of competencies has been well recognized as a key element for the achievement of company goals, complimenting core business processes, customer relationships, and financial issues; integration of all these elements will reflect as an increase in company’s competitiveness (Hamel & Prahalad, 1994; Norton & Kaplan, 1996).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Business Process: A structured and measured, managed, and controlled set of interrelated and interacting activities that uses resources to transform inputs into specified outputs.
Best Practice: A process, technique, methodology, or innovative use of resources that, through experience and research, has a proven record of success in providing significant improvement in cost, schedule, quality, performance, safety, environment, or other measurable factors which impact the health of an organization.
Competency: Capability to perform (business) processes (in collaboration with partners such as suppliers), having the necessary resources (human, technological, physical) available, and applying certain practices, with the final aim to offer certain products and/or services to the customers.
Virtual Organization: Represents a temporary alliance of diverse organizations that form a collaboration network, sharing knowledge, skills, and resources towards provision of value-added products and services and that resort to a computer network and associated tools to support their cooperation.
Capability: A potential ability to perform a (business) process, and the capacity shows availability of a resource or an associated partner.
Capacity: Ability to perform or produce something (good/service) in quantitative terms.
Virtual Organization Breeding Environment: Organizations’ pool and their related support institutions that have both the potential and the interest to cooperate with each other, through the establishment of a long-term based cooperation agreement.
Collaborative Industrial Networks: A set of entities (profit organizations, non-profit organizations, business freelancers, and individuals) sharing common aims.