Today I participated, together with an impressive number of world-renowned experts in BPM, to a hectic tweet jam on Social BPM.
I curated a (slightly remixed) recording of the session, which is available here (http://storify.com/marcobrambi/socialbpm) and embedded below.
The participation was so intense that it was really hard to keep the pace of the discussion (especially because I was having a conf call in parallel), so the recording has been definitely useful.
To get an idea, here are the final statistics on the discussion: 521 tweets generated 375,886 impressions, reaching an audience of 24,348 followers.
When I went through the contribution, I found a lot of hidden pearls that I missed.
Overall, my impression is the following: despite some criticism on the term “Social BPM”, I would say there is wide consensus on the need of integrating rigid BPM approaches with others that consider user interactions as crucial value for the enterprise. To my surprise, several experts (including Nathaniel Palmer and Clay Richardson) agree that there is a substantial request for these technologies by customers, especially in “non-traditional” scenarios. On the other side, the state of the art of the tools and systems is still perceived as weak or only partially addressing the actual needs.
This is definitely encouraging because it leaves a lot of space for research, improvement, and exciting evolutions in the field.
http://storify.com/marcobrambi/socialbpm.js<a href=”http://storify.com/marcobrambi/socialbpm” target=”_blank”>View “Social BPM discussion and tweetjam” on Storify</a>
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Great summary Marco!
A couple of thoughts. I don't think anyone buys social BPM software. The need is not for social, the need is for, and I believe someone mentioned it in the tweetjam, empowerment. Organizations are awakening to the reality that they can't rely on IT for everything and that the business (which by far outnumbers IT) needs to get back in the driver's seat and have a more hands on approach to finding opportunities for, documenting and implementing change (after all, core to innovative organizations are people and processes – http://blogs.forbes.com/tompost/2011/07/20/the-most-innovative-companies-today-and-tomorrow/).
“Social” is starting more and more to sound like the “How” in BPM (as in how do we achieve process improvement) and it feels like we need to move up the value chain and start talking more about the “Why” (as in process improvement is a lot more successful if you can engage everyone in your organization in process conversations). That's what I think the BPM buyers want to hear. Thoughts?
P.S.: A great video on the “why”, “how”, “what” theory can be seen here http://youtu.be/qp0HIF3SfI4 . It definitely inspired me.
You are right! Empowerment was definitely one of the most mentioned requirements. Sounds a little bit vague to me, but I definitely buy your vision on “how” vs. “why”.
I think it's our duty to let every stakeholder get involved in making up the enterprise processes, in a way that no expertise is left out of the continuous improvement loop.
Thanks for sharing these interesting references too!
Without trying to get into yet another thread on definitions 🙂 empowerment to me is equivalent to decentralizing BPM, taking it out of the hands of the few and putting it in the hands of the many. At first, this will happen within an organization's boundaries. The true potential of this however is when you'll start letting your suppliers, your customers and your partners (your entire ecosystem) to participate in process improvement. You can start seeing this a little bit with organizations inviting their customers to participate in their innovation processes, but sill more has to be done.
[scraped from Linkedin]Â I agree with Marco. I must say, however,
that his personal involvement was nothing short of spectacular. In
addition to recording the event, he kept up steady stream of great
comments and links. If you missed this event, you missed a lot of
high-energy “ah-ha’s” flowing constantly. It was like a party that
nobody wanted to leave.