The Future of Social BPM

Posted by: Alison Cooley on: July 1, 2010

Over the years organizational development processes have evolved to meet the ever changing needs of organizations. Business process management (BPM) has moved from a science-based, technical way of modeling organizations and automating processes to a human-centric discipline. While the combination of implementing BPM technology and best practices disciplines leads to the creation of highly successful, strategic processes for organizations, over time industry analysts have recognized a critical missing component—collaboration.

The concept of collaboration and the incorporation of social tools in BPM have prompted a significant amount of dialogue within the enterprise software industry (see related blog posts below). Many critics are not convinced of the industry need for integrating social components into BPM in a meaningful way. In many cases people view social BPM as hype – people are talking about the concept, but not demonstrating how it can be utilized to produce successful organizational models or significant results.

Applying social networking tools to BPM allows the organization to access a wealth of untapped resources. Though BPM is designed to yield the most optimal solutions, it has the tendency to ignore variance of opinions, ideas and work styles within the organization. Each person in a given model has unique characteristics, knowledge and skills, which lead to their ability to perform tasks. Recognizing that each person is inherently different, assigning everyone to completely identical series of processes hinders the organization’s ability to efficiently optimize their workflow capacity. Social BPM alleviates this problem because it provides a platform for individuals to express their unique abilities in a very real-time and interactive way. The future of social BPM lies in developing the best way to leverage social media tools to promote collaboration and coordination in the workplace – on an enterprise basis with a meaningful contribution to the business.

Social media tools give individuals the opportunity to work together in an open space to seamlessly design and shape their specific business models. When people are given the option to develop their own process, they are far more likely to efficiently use the model and be motivated to find additional areas for improvement. The idea behind it being – If you develop it, you will use it (rather than build it, and they will come).

Adding a social dimension to BPM transforms the way organizations identify, manage and resolve issues within their processes. Through these tools, an unlimited number of users are able to contribute their suggestions to the modeling process, thus creating the most successful, efficient processes for each organization and then interact with each other during day-to-day process execution to leverage specific skill sets as needed to make the best decisions. Social networking is then about sharing information and insights and doing business more effectively, rather than just socializing for personal gain.

Stay tuned for more on Metastorm’s upcoming announcements in the areas of enterprise collaboration and social BPM – we will soon be empowering business users in unprecedented new ways!

In the meantime, you can read up on the subject by perusing some of these recent blog posts on Social BPM:

Fast Forward Blog – Joe McKendrick

Forrester Research – Clay Richardson

Column 2.0 – Sandy Kemsley

Thoughts on Collaborative Planning – Keith Swenson