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Social BPM: Business Process Management Enters the 21st Century

by Joe McKendrick

June 26, 2010 at 10:23 pm · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, Social Computing, Social Media, User Revolution, Web 2.0

Business process management has always been kind of a staid, scientific approach to organizational development. So it hasn’t had a lot in common with social media and Enterprise 2.0, which has been more a free-form, unstructured world.

However, a new discipline is emerging that fuses the openness and transparency of social with the process-oriented sensibilities of BPM.

I just had the opportunity to moderate an online session with Clay Richardson, analyst with Forrester Research and highly regarded expert in this new field, and Kieth Swenson, vice president of research and development for Fujitsu.

Richardson points out that the Achilles’ Heel of many BPM projects has been the lack of communication and coordination between various teams in the organization. In the process, such efforts end up taking months. “How do we eliminate these consensus logjams?” he asks. “The biggest challenge they face is they’re bring teams together from multiple functional areas. It could take months.”

BPM’s heritage goes back to the “legacy ‘[Michael] Hammer and [James] Champy‘ style business process re-engineering; focusing on idea of re-engineering opportunities being identified by management. So management is coming in and saying ‘this is the way we can improve those specific processes — and then having those processes changed and automated by technologists before pushing it down on front-line workers. We saw the results of that. The front-line workers did not accept the final process.”

Social BPM may change this short-circuited process, Richardson says. As a result, a revolution is underway. “What were seeing in the process world is this idea of process populism,” he explains. “Last year, when I would speak with process pros or business stakeholders, they almost sounded frustrated, almost sounded like they had pitchforks in their hands. They’re going to IT and saying ‘we want more control. we’re starting to see more demand from business, instead of relying on IT.”

Richardson cited the example of a financial services firm that has had extensive BPM efforts underway for a number of years. “They’re very sophisticated with BPM; they are pretty advanced, and have multiple BPM tools in-house.” However, he adds, they were having issues with employee acceptance of BPM-driven initiatives. “They were really trying to increase end-user involvement, to get the end users to provide feedback, so when they rolled out business processes, they didn’t have this slow or low adoption of business processes.”

The solution was a relatively low-tech one, Richardson explains. “They used wikis, combined with the BPM suite. It allows users to tag and also provide feedback. In this case, they were setting up an electronic watercooler, which is a very simple thing to do. But it definitely brings more voices in.” The company improved their adoption rate across processes.”

Richardson offers the follow recommendations for moving to social BPM:

Understand what capabilities you need: “Provide a scorecard… look at the interaction that need to be supported… Look at the types of processes supported… Review personalities in your organization.”

Assess what capabilities you already have: “Look at the skills in your organization… Make sure you put governance around BPM. You want to provide the framework, best practices and guidance.”

Identify the steps to get started with social BPM: “Don’t try to roll out social everybody, but look at where to start…. Look at your first project, look at the results, and expand social throughout the enterprise.

Look at your environment and how you can embrace social: “It may not be all of the patterns, but look at the pattern and identify the one that makes sense for you.”

Educate the business: “The biggest challenge we see with social BPM, is the term social isn’t necessarily a business process-oriented term. At the end of the day, all of your processes will be impacted buy some way by social. We need to start looking at how the two worlds come together.”

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Jacob UkelsonJuly 1st, 2010 at 1:35 am

Joe,
Social BPM confuses me. There is nothing special about the process of generating a process map, and then automating the process using a BPMS – it is a classic knowledge worker process. It is unstructured, unpredictable and ad-hoc – but so are most knowledge workers process. It has an owner, a goal, a changing set of participants and documents play a central role – in short exactly the kind of process Adaptive Case Management is trying to address.

The focus should be on managing these types of processes in general, not looking at process modelling as a unique problem. That is the focus of Adaptive Case Management as laid out in “Managing the Unpredictable” a book on the subject on managing exactly these kinds of processes (http://www.masteringtheunpredictable.com/) and there is a tweetjam scheduled for July 15th (Keith will be attending).

Jacob Ukelson – CTO ActionBase

Pat FlandersJuly 8th, 2010 at 11:54 pm

Thanks, Joe – interesting point, but I’m still trying to determine what ’social BPM’ means to practitioners. I’ve been tweeting (@11gtweets) all week the question ‘What is social BPM’, and have yet to get a definitive answer. I suspect that many want to implement what you suggest, but may not yet know how to pair the ’social’ side with the ‘BPM’ side.