Support for virtual organisation creation - partners' profiles and competency management

The only possibility for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to succeed in marketing competition with big corporations is cooperation and sharing of knowledge and resources. A promising way to cooperate and keep their independence is the formation of semipermanent collaborative networks, which facilitate Virtual Organisation (VO) creation and management. This work concentrates on the maintenance and facilitation of partners’ profiles and competency management in such networks. The aim of our effort is to support potential partner identification during the VO creation and adaptation processes, as well as the facilitation of advertisement of oneself to be identified as a potential partner. The contributions of the work are the definition of competency and profile-related terms, the description of competency structures and an architecture of a competency and profiles management system, as well as a prototype verifying the presented theoretical work in a real business environment.