Information and Knowledge Management using ArcGIS ModelBuilder

Yadary Ortega-González et al.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: next section explains the Industrial Engineering
(IE) case study; section 3 introduces the conceptual model of the adopted procedure and the need of
an ontology to support its outcome. The fourth section provides a brief background of what
competency questions technique is in the ontological engineering field. Section 5 presents the
application of the aforesaid technique concerning the IT competences of IE in a business consultancy
process. Finally, a roadmap for the ontology development is discussed in section 6.
2. The IT competences of industrial engineering as case study
IE is the branch of the engineering that deals with the analysis, design, implementation and improving
of complex systems integrated by people, materials, information, technology, equipment, financial
resources, and energy (Salvendy 2001).
In the last years, IE has been called to deliver new capacities to the information society, mainly
because of its transdisciplinary nature (Sink et al. 2001), its changing role (Mundt 1982) and its
potential to achieve an integrated view of IT inside the business processes (Davenport and Short
1990, Subramoniam 2008). It can be said that the functions of IE have been moving from
manufacturing to services and processes, where the information resource and knowledge are the raw
materials (Desouza 2004, Champlin 2006).
However, there is not a consensus about IE practices and its required competences yet. The
aforementioned creates confusion and has serious consequences for the evaluation, acquisition, and
application of IE knowledge inside firms, especially in the case of the competences of the profession
regarding information-based processes. Afterwards, there is a lack of a clear understanding for both,
practitioners and managers, of how the IT competences of the profession can attain the processes
goals (Matson et al. 2007, Jackson et al. 2008).
Although scientific works reveal the overall competences of IE (Tirado et al. 2007, Marin-Garcia et al.
2008) and others are more oriented toward a particular technology (Balderrama et al. 2008), the
connections established among these works and the call for new disciplines –that allow the
profession, in a holistic manner, to create business value-added through IT (Van Rensburg 2006)–
appears hard to establish.
As every engineering discipline, IE needs a model to reach a continuous professional development
(Fink 2001). The procedure presented in this paper considers firms’ technological capacity and their
business processes as the contexts where engineering must activate its competences. As a result,
professional competences could be updated and linked with technologies along the business process.
Therefore, the need of identifying the IT competences which the IE profession mobilizes inside a
business process is the general problem statement for the conceptualization of the procedure
presented in the next section.
3. The PKO procedure
Focusing on the IE case study, this paper introduces a procedure entitled PKO (Ortega and Delgado
2011). PKO is an acronym derived from the procedure conceptual model, which combines information
about three variables: the profile of a profession (P), a specific body of knowledge (K) and an
organizational process (O) where the referred body of knowledge is critical (see Figure 1).
Information about the profession covers its job functions and its knowledge (theoretical and
procedural). Data gathered about the studied process regards its goal, the roles involved in it, as well
as its workflow with its tasks. So far, the body of knowledge is provided in a tabular form, in which
each entry denomination is briefly defined in natural language.
The proposed procedure starts from selecting a relevant process object of analysis, where a
professional should apply his IT competences. The general representation of the process is linked to
the IT that support its deployment and with a general professional profile of human resources roles
involved in the process. The combination of these three sets of elements serves to identify the
competences of the professional involved in the analysed process.
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