Competency management has become a new trend in the public sector. There is some doubt, however, if competency management is really something new or whether it is just old wine in new bottles. Academics seem to be more sceptical about its novelty than practitioners. This article attempts to combine theory and practice. Some theoretical aspects of competency management are explored and definitions, reasons for implementation, novelty and implications for the HRM function are discussed. The theory is then confronted with two cases of competency management in the public sector. The first deals with the appraisal system in the Flemish administration and the second with the HR‐policy towards public managers in the Dutch civil service. The research material for the case studies was collected during a research project on international perspectives for HRM in the Flemish government.

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In this paper we envisage the issue of Quality of Service (QoS) management for multimedia services as an end to end QoS discovery problem. With this perception as a basis, we designed and implemented a layered QoS management architecture which handles QoS from the user's perspective, as well as from the end system's and the network's perspective. The architecture is decomposed into three layers. First there is the QoS speci$cation, presentation and parameterization layec at which an end user is able to specih hidher QoS requirements in a comprehensible and qualitative way, and at which these QoS requirements are translated into parameterized terminal capabilities. Secondly, there is the QoS matching and negotiation layer at which the parameterized QoS capabilities of different terminal end systems are matched and compared in order to search for a QoS equilibrium. Finally, there is the QoS implementation layer; which implements the resolved QoS equilibrium in the network and in the terminals.This generic architecture, which allows a de-abstraction of user dejined QoS, has been implemented in the context of a CORBA based TINA platform.become more familiar with multimedia services, QoS will have to be approached from the user's perspective, as well as from the end system's and the network's perspective. End users wanting to come into a multimedia service should be able to specify their QoS requirements in a comprehensive and qualitative way. In turn, the terminal system will translate these specifications into parameterized terminal multimedia capabilities. Within the network the QoS capabilities of multiple end systems are matched and an optimal QoS equilibrium is implemented for the multimedia session.In this paper we will study a distributed QoS management and control architecture, which implements an end to end QoS discovery mechanism as explained above. This architecture has been designed and developed within a TINA framework with CORBA as a distributed processing environment (DPE). In this paper we will assume that the reader has a basic knowledge about the informational models managed by a TINA system and how such a system is decomposed into distributed computational components (for more information, see [ 11). The paper is further structured as follows: in the next section we will decompose the system in different layers and computational objects. The following two sections will each in turn discuss the important aspects of the different layers of the architecture. Section 5 includes a complete scenario and section 6 concludes the paper. A layered QoS Architecture projected on a TINA system 1 IntroductionThe widespread demand and use of interactive multimedia applications is setting forth new challenges on existing and emerging networking systems but also on the integrated control and management of quality of service (QoS). Provisioning and maintaining hard QoS guarantees during multimedia sessions is a complex process which encompasses tasks and procedures in both terminal and network domains. The majority...

Abstract:Keywords:In this paper, we address the design of a generic architecture for the management of residential services. The architecture consists of components both at the customers' side as well as at the service provider's side. The key features of the architecture are service modularity, the concept of service sessions, service packaging and subscription. The architecture allows service providers and telecom operators to rapidly provide new integrated value-added services to their customers. Layer-based design ensures that the architecture is independent of the particular service and service realization technology. The architecture provides generic access session management, service session mangement, subscription management and billing. Its implementation is based on J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition). The various components of the architecture will be discussed, together with the implementation issues.

In this paper we address the design and implementation of a generic terminal architecture for videoconferencing based on the principle of programmable protocol stacks. In this architecture, there exist two types of software components. A first type are the multimedia engines, which are responsible for handling the multimedia stream (execution layer). Secondly, the managing components handle the multimedia engines' lifecycles and provide a set of network-and codec-independent CORBA-IDL interfaces which make building the desired protocol stack straightforward (middleware based control layer). As a result, the developed platform can be easily integrated in existing multimedia control frameworks such as the TINA architecture or the H.323 terminal framework.