Bringing together BPM and Social Software

Bögel Stephan, Stieglitz Stefan, Meske Christian

Abstract
Traditional BPM approaches are well understood for hierarchical organizations that cope with highly repetitive and well-defined processes. Unfortunately, they do not work well for the most prevalent types of processes and exclude most of the employees from participation. Especially collaborative ad-hoc processes in a team-based organization are not covered by BPM methods. Social software is a widely accepted and promising approach to support participation but lacks mechanisms for controlling processes. The paper presents a novel approach using roles. Based on a systematic literature review, this paper contributes a solution-architecture for collaborative BPM and presents collaboration patterns expressed through role models. This helps overcoming the model-reality-divide and lost innovation in the business process modeling area. Furthermore, role-model based collaboration patterns can be used to monitor and control collaborative ad-hoc processes.

Keywords
Social Software; Social Media; Business Process Management; Business Process Modeling; Enterprise Modeling