Combining BPM and social software: contradiction or chance?

Abstract

Social software has received much attention in the academia and industry due to many success stories. However, although social software is used widely for business support, its relationship with Business Process Management has not been analysed. The results of the workshop on Business Process Management and Social Software (BPMS2'08), as part of the International Conference on Business Process Management in Milano, show the manifold possibilities of combining concepts from Business Process Management and social software. Social software provides a better integration of all stakeholders into the business process life cycle and offers new possibilities for a more effective and flexible design of business processes. The modelling of business processes may profit particularly from using social software techniques by alleviating the integration of process knowledge from all stakeholders. In addition, the implementation and deployment phase of the business process life cycle may profit from social software by collecting valuable information for continuous process improvement from a larger set of sources than before. Furthermore, social software environments may be used to provide workflow support. Moreover, the use of social software also requires new considerations about the digital identity and reputation in business processes. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Process Knowledge Discovery in Social BPM

“…Gartner discusses the collaborative nature of social BPM stating that it is a concept which describes collaboratively designed and iterated processes [9]. There has been some research in this area; however none of these have produced a formalized framework yet [3] [5]. SBPM aims to account for the unplanned participation of the users and alteration of the business processes to attain a www.ijacsa.thesai.org certain level of flexibility and complete enactment of the process steps more efficiently [1].…”

“…A number of benefits for SBPM has been identified as discussed in [5] [4], difficulty to evaluate [5], process management [26].…”

“…Goal-based modelling [31] is the approach which has been used [30] in order to overcome the rigid and sequential nature of traditional BPM systems since flexibility during runtime of the process cannot be achieved with sequential workflows [5]. Goal-based modelling provides a flexible process-flow whilst keeping the integrity of the processes intact in the social BPM framework.…”

“…Normally what would happen is that after a few iteration of completing a goal, the approach and series of steps which needs to be taken gradually becomes more structured [5]. These goals can then be re-evaluated going forward based on user feedback and experience of running the processes.…”

“…Unlike traditional BPM systems, in this approach sequence of actions are not enforced upon the user, rather it only guides the user throughout the enactment of the processes by enabling collaboration and participation from the user community [5].…”