Key challenges for enabling agile BPM with social software

TLDR

Agile Business Process Management is defined by its ability to quickly and adequately respond to internal and external events, requiring a new paradigm for the BPM life cycle. The paper argues that social software can meet the key requirements for agile BPM by leveraging weak ties, social production, egalitarianism, and mutual service provision. To support this claim, the authors present seven social software approaches and analyze how they support the three agile BPM requirements through the underlying features. © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Abstract

Abstract Business Process Management is called agile when it is able to react quickly and adequately to internal and external events. Agile Business Process Management requires putting the life cycle of business processes on a new paradigm. It is advocated in this paper that social software allows us to satisfy the key requirements for enabling agile BPM by applying the four features of social software: weak ties, social production, egalitarianism and mutual service provision. Organizational and semantic integration and responsiveness (of the business processes engineering, execution and management activities) have been identified as the main requirements for implementing an agile BPM life cycle. Social software may be used in the BPM life cycle in several manners and using numerous approaches. This paper presents seven among them and then analyzes the ‘support’ effects between those approaches and the underlying social software features, and the three requirements for Agile BPM. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.