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Social BPM: A Collision of Analytics and Collaboration
Social BPM is a phrase that’s starting to be thrown around a bit now. Clay Richardson of Forrester is a strong proponent. Social BPM is basically about what you get when you take BPM and merge it with the collaborative qualities of Social Networking. The two technologies themselves seem almost at opposite ends of the spectrum. BPM is all about the structure and planning of processes. Social Networking and Social Media, on the other hand, is about collaboration and discussion. The ROI for BPM is generally measurable, while the ROI for Social technologies is usually hard to quantify.
It’s actually a bit hard to imagine how Social BPM software would work. So much of BPM is based on hierarchies of peoples, divisions and departments. For example, what would ‘social’ mean for the ‘Review and Approval’ process that has become so common in many companies? That might depend on the nature of companies and the way that they’re evolving. Social Media has the capacity to break down and shrink the levels of hierarchy within organizations.
BPM is about tracking tasks and activities that have been assigned to employees in the company. Social tools may change the way a person works, enabling greater collaboration and more joint efforts. Social Media can help workers reach out to others within and outside of their organization for assistance in getting their jobs done. Bloggers like Theo Priestly say that social media is “transforming the enterprise to become something truly fluid and connected”.
My question though, is BPM up to the challenge? The rigidity of BPM structure is hard to escape. By it’s very nature, ‘Social’ implies an element of adhoc-ness, and that’s something that BPM has been stretching to accomodate, abd still hasn’t achieved. It’s hard to model the job and work path of the knowledge worker with boxes and arrows. A more likely scenario of what might happen in the enterprise is that enterprise social media (Enterprise 2.0) may evolve collaborative tools to better help workers perform their jobs.
I put my bet on Collaborative tools like Alfresco Share, SharePoint and Salesforce Chatter, rather than on BPM tools with bolted-on social features.
