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Showing posts with label social media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social media. Show all posts

BPM and Social media

I looked at this a while back and got no traction on it whatsoever. One problem I had was equating 'BPM' as a concept with 'Social media' as a concept. It seemed like they were too far apart
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.


Reminder: 'The Perfect Process Project' is still available. Don't miss the chance to get this valuable insight into how to make business processes work for you.

Click this link and follow the instructions to get this book.


All information is Copyright (C) G Comerford






It's amazing who might be looking

The beauty of social networking is that you never know who might be looking.

Take Linked-In, for example. I am on there (Profile here) and use it regularly for my business and to connect with people I meet and have interaction with. One of the things I like is that it tracks who looks at your profile and where you appear in searches. I was checking through my statistics today and it said 'Your profile has been reviewed by a Medical Writer at freelance'. So I clicked on the link to see who this might be. The first three names to appear on the list ('in order of relevance') are Chris Brogan, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama!

(The Hillary Clinton link was especially interesting as I have recently being doing work on The Special Relationship - a film which deals with the link between Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. As part of this I got to work alongside Hope Davies who played Hillary Clinton in that film. Small world)

Remember, you never know who might be watching, listening or researching when it comes to social media

Autoposted from The Posterous Cafe

2 Interesting developments from the "Process Cafe".

The human brain provides inspiration for artif...Image via Wikipedia

A couple of items came across my desk today which I wanted to pass out to you, my readers:

1) A Virtual Business Process Conference
I am linked in with a group of individuals who are looking at the concept of merging virtual environments with the world of business processes. There are a number of underlying reasons for doing this, but one of these is to allow processes to be designed and prototyped in a virtual world. The prospects are quite exciting. The group itself - under the leadership of Theo Priestley - has started things moving by creating a virtual Business Process Conference. The conference is called Process 2010 and will take place in March next year. This BPM showcase offers the most up to date insight on business process strategy and operational agility and will feature process excellence studies and successes across all industries, Workshop tutorial sessions and Keynotes on both old and new methods, and looking at advancing process management using new combinations of techniques and tools such as GIS (Geospacial Information), Workflow Artificial Intelligence and Virtual World Process Simulation. So why 'virtual'?: as Theo say's:

In today’s current economic climate, cost reduction is king. What better way to reduce over-burdening costs for flights and accommodation as well as the attendance price than to remove them entirely. No need for ‘justification’ kits or lengthy arguments on ROI.

By far the two biggest advantages are that (a) with the price of a single ticket, you can broadcast your attendance within your organisation so more people can actually gain advantage of keynote speeches, presentations and workshop sessions. You’ll be assigned an Avatar per attendee thus increasing the scope for coverage should you purchase more than one ticket and (b) Sponsorship and marketing packages not normally within reach of smaller organisations can now be accommodated and advertising space can be reserved according to your budget available.

Networking is obviously another great usage of the world space, and with the ability of Skype you can hold private conversations without finding a huddle space in a dark corner of the bar.

Holding this event in a virtual world brings other advantages:

  • Reduces travel time, expenses, and headaches
  • Removes the need to reserve blocks of hotel rooms
  • Weather conditions are no longer a factor (it’s always sunny in a virtual environment!)
  • BYO food and drink, convenience breaks to suit you not everyone else.
  • No long walks between presentation and exhibit locations: Avatars can teleport and fly (don’t worry, you’ll be taught how by our hosts)
  • No lines at the toilets or the bar….

If you are interested or want more details click over to the conference page here and register as either a participant, a sponsor or a speaker. I am very interested in this and am fully intending to either speak or participate when the time comes.

Location of AmsterdamImage via Wikipedia

2) An Amsterdam based TOGAF Training course.
PROMIS Solutions from Switzerland are holding one of their regular TOGAF training courses for those of you interested in Enterprise Architecture and this time it is in Amsterdam. As this will be the first course they have given in the Netherlands they have decided on an introductory fee of 1.400 EUR for the 5 day course including the Open Group certification cost. This is excellent value for the course. The course runs from 11. May until 15. May (five days). If you wish to participate then please check out the Pro-Mis training web-page and contact them directly. Mention GCP Consulting to make sure they know how you heard about them.

(After registration you will receive a course confirmation, the invoice and detailed information about the location as well as on transformation and lodging if required. Payments have to be credited to the account at the latest four week before the start of the training course. Training courses can be cancelled until four weeks in advance without any charges. For cancellations less than four weeks in advance 50% of the training course price will be due, if no acceptable replacement can be found. For cancellations on the day of training or non-attendance the total training fee will be due).








Five Simple Questions, No Easy Answers - The process version

Once again I defer to Amber Naslund over at the Altitude branding blog for her excellent post entitled Five Simple Questions, No Easy Answers.

It prompted me to see if there are similar questions that could arise in the process world

1. If you could change something about the way process management is tackled as it is right now, what would that be? Why would that improve things?

2. Give me a definition of 'process management' for a newbie, and you can’t use the words “BPM”, “Software as a service”, "process" or “tool”.

3. I’m a successful company, and I’m not yet looking at managing my processes or defining a process management capability. Why should it matter to me if what I’m doing isn’t broken?

4. Tell me the real challenges I’ll encounter as a business when I’m starting managing my processes. Now tell me why I should bother overcoming those when I have enough issues to deal with already - especially in this current economic environment.

5. Take 'process management' out of the sandbox. Tell me how else it moves business forward, operationally, culturally, otherwise, and how I can justify the cost of doing this.

What other questions are bugging you? (I have one more)

6. If people keep talking about BPM as something that is tool based, does it mean that I can't do this without spending money on equipping my organisation with these tools?



Reminder: 'The Perfect Process Project' is still available. Don't miss the chance to get this valuable insight into how to make business processes work for you.

Click this link and follow the instructions to get this book.



For more about me check out my "About Me' page

All information is Copyright (C) G Comerford

Marrying social networking with business process transformation

Marrying social networking with business process transformation is all about making the process work with the technology rather than the other way around. So says a new article quoting Cisco Systems.

This article from the Seri Atina blog discusses the issue around this. A key quote from the article is that "to be truly transformative social networking alone won’t cut it: business process transformation is a key factor" The article goes on to say "While the technology tends to get the attention,..... it’s the business process change enabled by social networking, when properly managed, that drives productivity gains. Just 10 per cent of the effort that goes into a successful social networking implementation is technological"

Being an old fashioned process person, the question I now have is "Should we change the process to leverage the technology?" Traditionally the answer on this has been "No", and I still maintain that if you design your process around your technology then whenever the technology changes your process will have to be re-designed. This is not good process management.

However, I believe that what we are saying in this case is that the process is being defined by the technology - which is a different thing altogether. I believe that the process as it is defined would probably not exist without the social media needed to make it happen. In this case I think there is a case to be built for using social media to leverage the process and to define it accordingly. However this still calls for ensuring that the process is not solution dependent (i.e let's build this process to work around Friendfeed or Yammer, rather than saying let's build the process around a generic social networking application that allows messaging and link sharing). At the point you get to the procedure, it is then appropriate to detail the application that will be used to make this happen.

Some interesting thoughts in the article. Well worth a quick read.

It also fits very nicely into my series of posts discussing the interaction between social media and business process management.