Matching Cognitive Characteristics of Actors and Tasks

Acquisition, application and testing of knowledge by actors trying to fulfill knowledge intensive tasks is becoming increasingly important for organizations due to trends such as globalization, the emergence of virtual organizations and growing product complexity. An actor’s management of basic cognitive functions, however, is at stake because of this increase in the need to acquire, apply and test knowledge during daily work. This paper specifically focusses on matchmaking between the cognitive characteristics supplied by an actor and the cognitive characteristics required to fulfill a certain knowledge intensive task. This is based on a categorization and characterization of actors and knowledge intensive tasks. A framework for a cognitive matchmaker system is introduced to compute actual match values and to be able to reason about the suitability of a specific actor to fulfill a task of a certain type.