A Model-driven Approach to Social BPM Applications

Together with Piero Fraternali and Carmen Vaca Ruiz I’ve recently written a chapter published within the Social BPM Handbook.

The book is published by Future Strategies in association with the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) in the BPM and Workflow Handbook Series and will be launched at Social Business Forum 2011 on June 8, 2011 in Milan, Italy (if you want to meet us, we will be there). The book will be on display also in the WebRatio booth at BPM Europe in London, from June 8 to June 10 (WebRatio is sponsoring the event).
The details on the book are available online, including the complete Introduction containing full Table of Contents and Abstracts of each chapter. The book is a valuable resource in the field and gathers the contributions of several experts including Clay Richardson, Keith Swenson, Nathaniel Palmer, Sandy Kemsley, Max J. Pucher (see the post on his chapter), Keith Harrison-Broninski, and many others (most of them are also listed in my Prominent BPM Bloggers post).

The title of our chapter is: A Model-driven Approach to Social BPM Applications.
It addresses the design and development of BPM solutions that encompass communication with social tools, open-ended communities of performers, and allocation and execution of tasks to actors not known at process design time, through interactions with social network platforms. The core of the proposed approach is threefold:
  • At the methodological level, providing a framework for understanding the ways to incorporate social interactions in business processes.
  • At the notational level, verifying the capacity of a mainstream process modeling language (BPMN 2.0) to express social interactions and cover Social BPM requirements.
  • At the technical level, exploiting model-driven software engineering techniques to produce applications enacting the social process directly from the (extended) BPMN process schema.
The main contributions of the chapter can be summarized as follows:
  • A classification of Social BPM adoption levels.
  • An extension of BPMN enabling social activities, events and conditional process flows.
  • An extension of the WebML (Web Modeling Language) for expressing Web applications interacting with social platforms, through abstract operations represented as components and design patterns.
  • A technical framework for generating Social BPM applications directly from specifications encoded in the social extension of BPMN 2.0, based on model transformations and on a runtime architecture integrating business process execution and social task enactment, implemented in a commercial tool suite called WebRatio BPM.

    If you want to know more, you can contact me or buy the book directly online. To keep updated on my activities you can subscribe to the RSS feed of my blog or follow my twitter account (@MarcoBrambi).

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