An ontology‐based competency model for workflow activity assignment policies

Purpose – Assigning business process activities to agents (human or automated) for their performance or supervision is a critical issue in business process management. Role‐based approaches are commonly used to specify work assignment policies, with roles defined as collections of capabilities and privileges required to perform job functions. The purpose of this paper is to address the activity assignment problem through a competency‐based approach. In this context, an ontology‐based competency model is developed to assist in identifying the competencies that exist in an organization and the competencies required, by workflow activities and in performing a competency gap analysis as a prerequisite for domain‐specific user development through competency‐based training. Design/methodology/approach – An approach for developing a business process activity assignment policy based on an ontology‐based competency model is presented. This model is also used to define domain‐specific training courses that enable users meet the competency requirements of process activities. In broad terms, the approach consists of the following steps: identification of the competencies required in order to perform the various activities involved in each business process and definition of roles based on these competencies; identification of the competencies acquired in the organization and assignment of users to roles; performance of competency gap analysis to identify the missing user competencies for role playing and identification of user development needs; and development of competency‐based training scenarios intended to fill the user competency gaps. Findings – An experimental implementation of the ontology‐based competency model proposed in the banking domain provided a fine‐grained role structure that was based on the competencies required by business process activities, and a user‐to‐role assignment that closely matched the competencies required for role playing, and brought forward missing user competencies that pointed to required user training needs. Originality/value – The proposed ontology‐based competency model fulfils the need for a sustained work assignment approach based on user roles. To this end, roles and users are defined as collections of required and acquired competencies, respectively. A novel approach based on ontology‐based competency ontologies was also developed to fill required but missing user competencies.