The Impact of Conceptual Modeling on Allocation of Human Resources in Collaborative Networks

The growth in electronic commerce is accompanied by the requirement of swift reactions to changed market situations. In this article, a new modeling method to enable identification of competence driven resource requirements based on business processes is introduced. This method facilitates matching offers and derived requirements in order to identify appropriate partners. Even if the importance of conceptual models for success of these projects is not doubted, the modeling project itself can be quite complex, since different models have to be compared and composed. The result of a modeling project can be almost void if integration conflicts prevent a comparison of modeling artifacts and therefore render the models useless. Hence, apart from calculation methods, models need a similar level of abstraction and a concept for describing bidders and buyers’ needs in order to ease comparability. This is far from being trivial because of a semantic gap between requirements specifications in distributed created models. This article tackles this problem in an early stage and presents methods to improve comparability of models. Finally an approach that fosters a global view on market offers is presented as a foundation of model comparisons.