Competence maps for the information service industry

The primary aim of this paper is to construct competence maps for the information service industry. Starting with a review of the literature related to the information service industry and the competence in this industry, this study defined a pool of competence items and developed a questionnaire for field survey. Based on the data collected from the information service companies in Taiwan, a series of factor analyses with item filtration was carried out. This resulted in a six-factor solution including Cognition, Management I (organizing, leading, and controlling), Management II (planning), Technology Infrastructure, Application Systems, and Clerical Processing as the competence sets. Then the factor-based scales were created to represent the derived competence sets, the pairwise correlations between these scales were calculated, and the competence maps were constructed accordingly. The results obtained may be helpful to the internal (e.g., training/education, deployment, or substitution) and the external (e.g., recruitment) developments of human resource in information service companies.