Social BPM fuses BPM practices with social networking applications, with the aim of enhancing the enterprise performance by means of a controlled participation of external stakeholders to process design and enactment. The purpose of this participation is the exploitation of the operational value of the company, hidden within the personal behaviours and relations. In the presentation we address three main points: - The motivation and requirements associated with Social BPM - The concrete objectives that organizations can earn in terms of efficiency improvement, including: exploitation of weak ties and implicit knowledge; increase of transparency in process execution; user participation and engagement; distribution of decision and activity execution; feedback collection; and knowledge sharing - The status of the Social BPM offer and the coverage of the above objectives For each objective, pros and cons of the various solutions are discussed and concrete examples are used for describing the problem. Practical and innovative techniques are introduced too (e.g., crowdsearching, gamification, social network analysis, extended BP modeling notations, agile cycles for process improvement).

1. Social BPM
Combining Social Web and BPM for Improving
Enterprise Performance
Emanuele Molteni, WebRatio
Marco Brambilla, WebRatio and Politecnico di Milano
BPM Europe 2012, London - June 19th, 2012

2. Social BPM: The idea
Integrating social network tools and practices
with BPM for improving effectiveness
and efficiency of business processes
Social for BP design and improvement
 Integration of social networks in BPM-based interfaces
 Collecting feedback
 Analysing streams
Social for BP participation and implementation
 Integration of social networks in
BPM-based interfaces
 Some tasks implemented through
social interaction instead of
traditional applications
– Social assignment of responsibility
– Escalation
– Task execution
– Destructured processes (vs. email)

3. Socialization goals
Weak Ties / Tacit Knowledge – eg. team formation
Knowledge sharing – eg. self-served tech support
Social Feedback – eg. quality monitoring
Transparency – eg. PA, government
Participation – eg. participatory budget
Activity distribution – eg. crowd-sourced tasks
Decision distribution – eg. social CRM

4. Social networks and tools
It’s not just about
Twitter
and
Facebook
Tens of categories
Hundreds of solutions
Different purposes
Source: http://www.theconversationprism.com/

5. Power to people! (How much?)
Internal user: enterprise user
formally enrolled in the
business processes
External users:
enterprise, thirdy-party or
final users whose social
interactions are exploited
within some business
activities
Empowere Enterprise Enterprise
No social d Enterprise Democracy
Only social
View
(internal users can (internal users (internal users have (all users interact on
(all users interact in
access the enterprise interact on the partial visibility ot the social platform, no
the Enterprise platform with enterprise platform access to the access to the social
platform, no social advanced interaction with the same contents on the contents from the
content or action) options with the interaction options social platform enterprise UI)
external ones, who of the external ones through the
access the social that interact with the enterprise UI)
platform) social platform)
Completely Completely based
indipendent from on social input
social input

6. Implementation: where & how
The questions are:
 How much to delegate to the social platform?
 How much to implement within the enterprise?
Community
Business Logic
User Interface
Social Enterprise

7. Impact on the BPM cycle
Social BPM
notation Socialization
design
Design patterns
Socialization
goals
Optimize Model
Deploy Model
Monitor transformation
Participatory &
social enactment
Execute Social BPM
architecture

8. Social BPM design patterns
As in the tradition of BPM design patterns, they capture
reusable solutions to recurrent socialization
requirements:
Dynamic enrollment
Poll
People / Skill search
Social content publication
Social sourcing (vs. crowdsourcing)
Progress notification
Ranking and commenting

9. Design patterns and goals
Socialization goals can be used as drivers for the
selection of the social BPM design patterns that are
more relevant to a process socialization effort
Weak Ties
Activity Decision Social
/ Tacit Transparenc Participatio Knowledg
distributio distributio Feedbac
Knowledg y n e sharing
n n k
e
Dynamic
X
enrollment
Poll X X
People / Skill
X X X
search
Social content
X X
publication
Social sourcing X
Progress
X
notification
Ranking and
X X X X
commenting

10. Social Extensions
Four main extensions to “orthodox” BPM thinking
Social Monitoring, addressing capturing of the social events within
the enterprise platform
Social Behavior, describing the possible social interaction activities
Social Content, specifying information which is shared or
produced in a social way
Social Access, describing the social platform properties, including
the access management options

11. Social BPMN extensions: Social Lane
Role type Description Icon
Internal performer Directly affects case and
activity progress
Internal observer May produce event and
artifacts that indirectly affect
case and activity progress
External observer Can be informed and
partecipate through social
network platform

12. Social BPMN extensions: Social tasks
Task Type Icon
Publish
Invite + Invite
Comment Comment
Vote Vote
Rank Rank

13. Publish and Invite tasks – different scopes
Audience scope Visual description Icon
Broadcast The task type icon with a
thick arrow pointing to the
social network audience
Invite to vote
on the poll
Multicast The task type icon with 3
small arrows pointing to the
social network audience
Invite to vote
on the poll
Unicast The task type icon with a one
single arrow pointing to the
social network audience
Invite to vote
on the poll

14. A simple example
Social generation of metrics for quality assessment of
government offices (PA sector)
Public Metrics
Local government office
Supervisor
Calculate
Identify Collect and
Evaluate weighted
public review votes and
all metrics evaluation Publish
metrics Publish metrics comments result evaluation
to citizens result
Social Network
Citizens
Vote on public
metrics Comment

15. Example with patterns: Build a team

16. A Method for Social BPM based on MDD
Model-driven approach to Process and software application models.
Social aspects are considered at the various levels and transformed to
running code.
Social Process Model Social Application Model
Vote
Invite
It is used to define: It is used to define:
•Social actors (e.g., Community Pools) •Exchange of user profiles from/to SN
•Social Activities (twittering, voting, following..) •Social data (e.g., shared content)
•Social events •Interface and components for social tasks (e.g., twittering,
voting, tagging, following)
Based on BPMN social design patterns Based on WebML social components

17. Techniques for (larger) social enterprise
Crowdsourcing
Game with a purpose / gamification
Datamining

18. Crowdsourcing example: knowledge retrieval
From individual information extraction (even upon enterprise
knowledge base) to friends, colleagues and experts feedback
Enterprise vs. general purpose
Emphasis on social or expertise relations more than anonymous
crowds Initial
query
Exploration
Exploratory step Human
Information Knowledge
Search
collection Search
Harvesting
System
(individual) System
(social)
Exploration
step
System API Social API
Database / Crowd /
IR index Community

19. Example

20. Multi-platform deployment
Multiple social platform deployment
Advantages of model-driven development
Task Generated query template request
or knowledge harvesting
Embedded External Standalone
application application application
API
Social/ Crowd platform
Native
Embedding behaviours
Community / Crowd

21. Crowdsourcing task management problems
Task splitting: the collection is too complex relative to the
cognitive capabilities of users.
Task structuring: the task is too complex or too critical to be
executed in one shot.
Task routing: a task can be distributed according to the values of
some attribute of the collection.
User interaction: search tasks may imply complex UI design
Again, easier to be addressed
through a model-driven approach

22. Efficient development of crowdsourcing
Apply model-driven techniques to Social and Search:
MacroTask Description (BPMN)
M2M Transformation
MicroTask Description (BPMN)
M2M Transformation
User Interaction Model (WebML+ER)
M2T Transformations
Stand-alone Application embedded
application in social network

23. Gamification
The process of game-thinking and game mechanics to
engage users and solve problems
Turning user and employee experience into a game (including
reward for achievements) can produce behavior change
Typical structures: input agreement, output agreement, inversion
problem.
Symmetric or asymmetric participation

24. Gamification
The process of game-thinking and game mechanics to engage users and solve
problems
Turning user and employee experience into a game (including reward for
achievements) can produce behavior change
Typical structures: input agreement, output agreement, inversion problem.
Symmetric or asymmetric participation

25. Lessons learned

26. Advantages
Faster response to customer perceptions (especially when not
explicitly shared with the company)
Flexibility in assigning tasks and executing models
Involvement/ participation: GWAP techniques work also in
enterprise
Indirect long-term advantages for enterprise (e.g., knowledge
base and sharing)
Direct advantage on the resources

27. Challenges
Skepticism
Enterprise attitude
Risk of loosing control
Perception of non-strategical role, not connected to personal
results
Tendency of crowdsourcing 

28. Thank you!
Contact us: http://www.webratio.com
emanuele.molteni@webratio.com marco.brambilla@polimi.it
emanuelemolteni marcobrambi
emanuelemolteni marcobrambi