COMPETENCE DEVELOPMENT AMONG IT-CONSULTANTS
The Need for Collective and Structured Reflection
Stefan Cronholm
Dept. of Management and Engineering, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden
Business and Informatics, Univerity of Borås, Sweden
Göran Goldkuhl
Dept. of Management and Engineering, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden
Keywords: Competence Development, Organizational learning, Knowledge in action.
Abstract: This paper is about the knowledge transferring between IT-consultants. IT-consultants are involved in many
complex and challenging situations. They need to manage organisational, semantic and technical issues.
Managing this complexity requires a high and a variety of competences. Examples of competences needed
are business development, project management, information system development methods and techniques.
An IT-consultant often makes continuous movements between different assignments and clients. The
competence developed is often individually based. Individually based knowledge is not sufficient since the
IT-consultants have to carry organisational working procedures. Furthermore, the competence needed is not
static; it is something that should evolve dynamically. In this paper we are proposing a collective
competence development approach. The collective competence development approach consists of a process
model and a conceptual model. The aim of both these models is to make individual based knowledge as
subject to collective reflection.
1 INTRODUCTION
IT-consultants have to face many challenging
situations. They need to manage complex
organisational, semantic and technical issues. Often
they need to manage these demands under a strong
time pressure. Facing these different situations
means that they need to have a high competence
within different areas and be able to integrate them
in an effective manner. IT-consultants need to carry,
develop and integrate different competencies such as
competence about business development, project
management, information system development
methods and techniques.
The competition between consultancy firms
makes it not enough with an individually based
consult competence; rather the IT-consultants have
to carry organisational working procedures. It is not
sufficient with knowledgeable individuals. The
different consultants of the firm should carry a
(partially) joint way of working characteristic to
their organisation. This way of working forms the
core organisational competence. This organisational
competence is not a static phenomenon. It should
evolve dynamically. It should evolve among
consultants and their managers and also in
interaction with the clients. A consultant firm
possessing a high organisational competence is
selling more than working hours; they are selling a
reflected development approach. The competence of
the IT-consultants is decisive concerning the
outcome in the clients’ organisations.
The technological development within IT is fast
which entails a need of competence development
among IT-consultants. This is one reason for
conducting a study on competence development.
Besides this “technical” motive there are other
motives related to the nature of the IT-consultants’
work situation. 1) IT-consultants often work
individually and there are rarely planned activities
for exchange of experiences. Instead, a familiar
situation may be that IT-consultants randomly are
meeting at the coffee machine and hastily exchange
experiences. This means an ad hoc development of
joint competencies. 2) The work situation of IT-
258
Cronholm S. and Goldkuhl G. (2009).
COMPETENCE DEVELOPMENT AMONG IT-CONSULTANTS - The Need for Collective and Structured Reflection.
In Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing, pages 258-261
DOI: 10.5220/0002271702580261
Copyright
c
 SciTePress

consultants is often special in several ways. It is not
unusual that IT-consultants spend a lot of time
outside their ordinary working place since their
business is taking place at the clients’ organisations.
3) IT-consultants often collaborate with clients
rather than with other IT-consultants. If the IT
consultant is the only representative from the IT-
organisation the interaction with other consultants is
limited. The character of the IT-consultants’ work
situation means that there is a risk that the
competence resides on an individual level and will
not be properly transferred to the collective or
organisational level.
The listed motives above forms a base for our
research question; how can development of
collevtive competence among IT-consultants be
structured? The question implies to identify means
for moving away from a situation where solely
individual learning is taking place to a situation
where collective learning is added.
2 ACTION AND LEARNING IN
ORGANISATION
There are several scholars who have described the
continual learning through action. One of the most
re-known models is the experiential learning cycle
by Kolb (1984). He describes that learning occurs
through a cycle of four phases: 1) Concrete
experiences, 2) reflective observation, 3) abstract
conceptualization and 4) active experimentation.
Kolb’s model describes individual processes of
learning. These individual processes can however be
expanded to an interactional and collective level.
Through dialogues, colleagues can participate in
collective reflection and abstraction (Høyrup, 2004).
A basic idea of our research is that group processes
of dialogue and collective reflection can be essential
enablers for articulating tacit knowledge.
The implicit and tacit knowledge-in-use can be
articulated in processes of reflection. The starting
point for this articulation is something considered
problematic (Dewey 1938; Argyris & Schön, 1996);
something that is part of an actor’s concrete
experiences (the first step in Kolb’s learning cycle).
It is important to really start with the concrete
experiences of an actor in the dialogue process.
Otherwise there is a risk that the actor explicates his
rationalizations (i.e. his private and taken-for-
granted explanations) of the problematic situations
and the rest of the group is not involved in reflection
from its inception. If the actor expresses his
explanations in an already generalized way, neither
the complexity in the problematic situation nor his
colleagues are used as genuine resources in the
inquiry process. Therefore it is important to start
such a process with the concrete stories of
problematic situations. Concrete storytelling is a
good starting point for organisational learning
(Abma, 2003).
Stories that have been told can be reflected on in
a dialogue and conclusions can be drawn from these
collective reflections (step 2 in the learning cycle).
This is one step away from the concrete character of
the exposed experiences. This can be taken one step
further through abstraction and generalisation. New
concepts and action strategies can be formulated
(step 3) which later can be tested out in new
organisational actions (step 4).
3 RESEARCH APPROACH
The research approach is organised as action
research (e.g. Lewin, 1946; Checkland, 1991). There
are different ways to describe action research. A
well-known way is to describe it as a cyclical
process consisting of the five recurrent phases:
diagnosis, action planning, action taking, evaluation
and specifying learning (Susman & Evered, 1978).
In order to answer the research question we have
arranged a reflection arena. In this arena eight IT-
consultants and two researcher participated. The
research question (see esction 1) was divided into
two main questions: “how to do?” and “what to talk
about?”. Eight different discussion themes were uses
as a base. A discussion theme consist of a relevant
event or recently perceived problem. Examples of
themes discussed are: competence of clients,
allocation of the clients’ resources in projects, and
the IT-consultants relation to the customer service.
Each theme was analysed separately. The question
of how to do resulted in a process model and the
question of what to tlk about resulted in a conceptual
model (see section 4).
Before the study started we had a rough idea
about how to proceed based on earlier experience
and study of literature (see section 2). Accordingly,
as this study continued, more data were gathered and
the models were refined. This follows the basic idea
on action research (put forth by Checkland, 1991) to
continually refine frameworks. The refined models
supported the conduct and the data gathering during
the following reflection meetings. In this dialectical
way the models had an impact on the data gathering
and the data gathered had an impact on the
development of the models.
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4 MODELS FOR STRUCTURING
COMPETENCE
DEVELOPMENT
4.1 The Process Model
The process model consists of two parts; a reflection
arena and the regular business practice (see figure
1). The reflection arena consists of a group process
supported by a facilitator with the following steps 1)
identify challenges from concrete situations (story
telling – an IT-consultant describes the challenges in
a specific situation, 2) reconstruct the situation,
identify conditions that obstructed the work and the
tactics used, 3) identify if other IT-consultants have
similar experiences and if other tactics have been
used 4) collective critical reflection of used tactics
and actions taken, 5) formulation of goals and
values, 6) formulation of new tactics based on earlier
challenges and values.
The analysis of the empirical data revealed the
importance of collective articulation, abstraction and
reflection. During these processes there was a
collective learning since competence was transferred
among the IT-consultants. Following the process,
means to move from an individual competence
experienced in a specific situation to a reflected
abstraction that are constructed as a collective
process.
Figure 1: The process model.
The facilitator supported the collective process by
the use of generative questions. The aim of these
questions was to get a richer picture of the story told.
Examples of such questions are: “describe the
experience?”, “what actions have been taken?”,
“were there any obstacles?” and “describe the tactics
you used?”. These questions encouraged the IT-
consultant to articulate his/her ‘tacit’ knowledge
about the problem. The challenge was often
recognized by other IT-consultants and by adding
their experience the knowledge about the challenge
expanded. The different questions posed by the
researchers/facilitators supported that an individual
challenge became a theme for collective reflection.
The result of the collective process should
beocumented in a dynamic competence tool. The
dynamic competence tool should then be used in the
regular practice by individual IT-consultants. New
proposed tactics can in this way be tested and
comments can be registered in the tool. Comments
are available for all the IT-consultants in their future
interaction with clients. This part of the process has
not yet been investigated.
4.2 The Conceptual Model
The conceptual model concerns results about what to
articulate. The model consists of six categories that
are conceptually related to each other (see figure 2):
1) Problem situation: the aim of this category is to
describe and delimit the theme discussed. 2) Actors:
the aim of this category is to understand who are
involved in the problem situation and which actors
are communicating. 3) Action course: the aim of this
category is to understand the communication process
between the client and the IT-organisation. 4)
Problems: the aim of this category is to identify
perceived problems in the problem situation. 5)
Goals and values: the aim of this category is to
identify what the IT-organisation want to fulfil and
what values that exist. 6) Tactics: A tactic is a
particular way to conduct an action. A tactic is used
in order to satisfy a need of a client or to simply
solve a problem. Tactics consists of two sub-
categories problem-reducing tactics and problem-
reinforcing tactics
The category problem situation is a base for
identifying involved actors and is contextualized in
an action course (consisting of action conditions,
actions and action results). Action course works as a
base for deduce problems and goals/values.
Problems are managed through the use of tactics and
tactics are classified as two sub-categories; problem-
reinforcing tactics and problem-reducing tactics. The
problem-reinforcing tactics legitimate an incorrect
behaviour according to the goals while the problem-
reducing tactics are reducing or even eliminating
problems. The usage of problem-reducing tactics
contributes to the fulfilment of goals/values.
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Figure 2: The conceptual model
5 CONCLUSIONS
The findings consist of an approach for organising a
structured collective competence development. The
main message of this approach is to move away
from an ad-hoc based individual learning to a
structured reflective and collective learning.
The proposed models have supported collective
competence development. The conceptual model has
supported the IT-consultants in making abstractions
of their own concrete experiences from specific
assignments. Through these abstractions it has been
possible to transfer the competence to other
assignments managed by colleagues. We claim that
it is important to view the transferring of
competence as a continuous movement back and
forth between the concrete and the abstract. This
means that abstract formulations can be made
understandable through concrete examples and
concrete examples can be used for making
abstractions that are used for transferring
competence to other situations. A shift in the levels
of abstraction during problem solving have proved
to be supportive by Wason & Johnson-Laird (1972).
According to Marsick and Watkins (1993) this
type of learning is today widely accepted since
learning takes places as a result of critical reflection
on one's own experiences rather than as a result of
formal training in remembering of dull theories
Reflecting upon own working procedures was
perceived as highly motivating among the IT-
consultants and the discusission themes have
stimulated individual reflection and learning. Using
a reflection arena is also line with theories of Dewey
(1938). According to Dewey learning must address
the notion of reflective thought. A reflective thought
begins with an ambiguous situation that in some way
represents a dilemma to an individual (Drejer, 2000).
This paper presents preliminary results. To be
able to generalize, the next step is to broaden the
study through adding another case (another IT-firm).
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