Social BPM

Business Process Management and Workflow are, by their very nature, social activities. The collaboration and communication patterns that are now increasingly referred to as '¬Ssocial computing'¬ were also fundamental to the BPM and workflow models of the early 1990s. Yet it has been the recent explosion of social computing and accompanying success of social production, from Linux to Wikipedia, and Facebook to Twitter, which have had the most dramatic impact on collaboration in business environments. Today we see the transformation of both the look and feel of BPM technologies along the lines of social media, as well as the increasing adoption of social tools and techniques democratizing process development and design. It is along these two trend lines; the evolution of system interfaces and the increased engagement of stakeholders in process improvement, that Social BPM has taken shape.As explained by WfMC Fellow Dr. Michael zur Muehlen, '¬SIf you only focus on streamlining process execution and making it as efficient as possible the social aspect diminishes. But if you consider process discovery, the development of a shared understanding of what your operations look like, and monitoring your process environment, then social plays a big role. Social is all about providing context, a rich environment of data points that a streamlined workflow would be lacking otherwise. The challenge is to make this context useful, both from a social networking perspective and from an unstructured data perspective.'¬