Sandy Kemsley has put together a presentation which touches on some of the main points regarding this:
- Drivers for BPM: These include items such as 'Changing user expectation', 'trends towards greater collaboration', and 'Lack of agility in many current BPMS implementations'
- Collaborative process modeling with points such as multiple people participating in discovery and modeling of processes
- Collaborative process execution where users can step outside the structured process and create an ad-hoc collaboration
BPM and social networking
My takeaway from all of this is that the use of 'social networking' in a BPM sphere is rather more limited than I imagined, but does include a much broader definition of social networking. For example she mentions Google Wave as a tool to be used in process discovery as well as the use of forums to create external communities of practice. I don't discount any of these ideas but I don't specifically align them with 'social networking and BPM' With the broadening in the definition of Social Networking in this case I think it is a lot easier to classify items which were previously one thing as another (user forums and email, for example)
Summary
There is no doubt in my mind that the technologies and mind-set shifts that Sandy describes are having a profound effect on the way people do business today (or at the very least are building a foundation that will facilitate larger scale uptake in the near future), but whether this can truly be called 'BPM and Social media', I would question.
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