In the last years Italian university has received a lot of criticisms especially about its performance. It is common opinion that these problems are mainly consequence of inappropriate schemes of rules and incentives. However I believe this management ineffectiveness is due to the lack of an appropriate approach to academic complexity.
This paper aims to reduce this absence by the definition of a University's production function. Actually academic activity can be represented as a complex problem, but there is the need to select a useful criterion of representation and to make academic activity a decomposable system. I suggest to study processes that lie under university production, to overlap an adequate competence scheme to them
and to modularize the problem structure. An academic activity representation founded on
competences allows to redefine and reduce academic complexity and to build a more effective human resources management system.