Towards Automated Skill and Competency Management in IT Companies

Analysing company skills is challenging, especially in the rapidly evolving IT landscape. SecDevOps, with its collaborative nature and tools, offers valuable data on development activities and team interactions, streamlining and securing software production. We aim to capitalise on such data to populate a competency model and ultimately build a corporate competency analysis system. Our goal is a system that interacts with existing ones, automatically harvests data from them and provides a dynamic, data-driven understanding of evolving competencies, going beyond static frameworks. Because toolsets for project management, development, and data management are constantly in flux, we require a highly flexible and future-proof system architecture. Therefore, we designed a System of Systems (SoS) that encompasses all those tools as legacy systems and allows seamless component integration without modifying existing ones. We harness each legacy system by a specialised data extractor, mining skill information and allowing for the specialised analysis of various work activities. Such an SoS architecture facilitates data collection from various sources, creating a comprehensive view of individual and team competencies. This distributed approach offers scalability and flexibility through the ease with which modules can be added to the system, and provides fast and up-to-date insights into evolving skill-sets, enabling proactive talent management. In order to take full advantage of the flexibility we have in the choice of inputs, the data model must be easy to extend and modify, accommodating new information as the system scales and keeping pace with the evolution of the competency world. Our research demonstrates how this distributed SoS classifies competencies and fosters a learning organisation. It facilitates targeted training by revealing individual and team strengths and weaknesses. Visualising skill relationships helps identify gaps and inform workforce planning. This dynamic, data-driven competency management approach provides organisations with a powerful tool to navigate the complexities of modern IT.