This research aims at innovative IT support for competence management (CM) integrating organizational, group and individual perspectives. Our method is action case research resulting in a design model. This paper addresses our overall approach towards an integrative CM system, which is usage-oriented. Based on in-depth analysis of seven business companies’ CM activities, we present a new interactive visualization model for CM. The model is suitable for explorative analysis and for communicating competence situations at individual, group or organizational levels. It provides support for constructing competence information incrementally. We view competence descriptions as negotiable estimations with varying verification levels, and use a competence representation which deals with uncertainties of estimations. Our view on competence is novel, and has far reaching consequences. Future work includes a running prototype and planned pilot studies.