Leveraging social bpm for enterprise transformation

Leveraging Social BPM
For Enterprise Transformation

Introduction
Social BPM is gaining recognition as a driver of knowledge worker
productivity. But what is social BPM, and how does it compare
with the more general classes of social business applications? How
can social BPM be used as part of an overall enterprise
transformation initiative?
This white paper explores the drivers behind social BPM, and
provides insights into its four main manifestations: collaborative
process discovery, runtime collaboration, process event streams,
and BPM communities. It also discusses the network effects that
fuel the expansion of social BPM, acting as a catalyst for
transformation of an enterprise’s processes, performance and work
culture, and finishes with a number of best practices for adopting
social BPM within your organization.

Why Social Business? Why Social BPM?
© 2011 Kemsley Design Ltd.
www.kemsleydesign.com
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To understand social business software, consider two key
characteristics of consumer social software, or Web 2.0, as defined1
in 2005:


Uses the web as a platform, with a browser-based rich user
interface that provides equivalent functionality to a desktop
application. In addition to requiring no local installation,
thereby lowering costs and providing greater desktop plat-

form support, this allows for a constantly-refreshing
software upgrade cycle. To further reduce the cost of
ownership, software-as-a-service providers host applications
and make them available via a monthly subscription, rather
than requiring the purchase and installation of software
locally: Nicholas Carr describes this emerging “utility” model
of computing2, comparing it to the shift from private
electricity production to centralized power plants that sell
electricity on a usage-metered basis.


Harnesses collective intelligence by allowing user-directed
and user-created content and collaboration. Although only a
small percentage of users will contribute, their contributions
are available to all users.

By 2006, Andrew McAfee had defined the enterprise equivalent3,
Enterprise 2.0, as “platforms that companies can buy or build in
order to make visible the practices and outputs of their knowledge
workers.” As with their consumer equivalents, social business
applications allow for emergent structure and processes rather
than imposing pre-determined taxonomies and procedures.
However, social business applications usually have a businessrelated purpose rather than a purely social function. These break
down into two main categories:


Applications focused on social interactions that strengthen
weak ties within a large and/or geographically diverse
organization. For example, an internal social network that

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allows employees to create profile pages can be used for
locating others with specific skills and interests for research

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and project collaboration, although that collaboration does
not necessarily happen within the social application itself.


Applications focused on goal-oriented social production. For
example, a wiki used to document internal operational

procedures can be updated directly by any worker with
information on specific areas of the procedures.
The past few years have seen a huge increase in the social
business software market, but many organizations still struggle to
identify the benefits, particularly with applications that are focused
on relationships rather than production. The applications that
support social production can also be problematic unless they are
integrated into the main business processes that workers are
tasked with completing: otherwise, they’re just one more thing that
someone needs to do during their busy work day without adding
significant value to their work.
One solution for this is to integrate the social business
functionality directly in the line of business applications that
workers use every day, and business process management systems
(BPMS) are proving to be an ideal platform for that integration.
BPMS, used for modeling, automating and monitoring business
processes, are now being extended to create a class of functionality
called “Social BPM”.

Social Aspects of BPM
The motivation for social BPM contains many facets4:


User expectations based on commercial social software.
Today’s workers expect to be able to configure their own

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environment to suit their working style, to collaborate with
others at any point in a business process where they see fit,
and to combine information from multiple internal and

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external sources in order to accomplish their tasks.


Benefits of distributing co-creation across the value chain.
Involving workers at all levels in process discovery and

definition results in process models that more accurately
capture the actual processes.


Greater agility in BPMS implementations. Instead of using a
BPMS as a graphical development tool in a classic waterfall
software development lifecycle, supporting agile methods for
process discovery and implementation allows processes to
change quickly to meet business needs.

Over the past five years, social BPM has moved from a distant goal
to an emerging set of features in BPM tools. The idea of “social”
manifests in four primary ways in BPM systems:


Collaborative process discovery. Many people from a variety
of perspectives – including end users, business analysts and
IT – are involved in modeling processes.



Runtime collaboration. During execution, processes are
modified dynamically to include unplanned participants in
order to complete the work more effectively.



Process event streams. Publishing event streams for both
process models and runtime process instances enables
visibility and participation across a broader range of
participants and devices.



Internal and external BPM communities for sharing best
practices

As Gartner Research states: “Social BPM resides at the intersection
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of process and collaborative activity. It is supported by BPM and
social software that makes process design more visible and holistic.
It supports more effective process execution through the use of
social software tools that augment human actions to better mirror
the way work is performed, while also providing visibility to this
work”.5

Collaborative Process Discovery: a Catalyst to
Enterprise Transformation
Collaborative process discovery in particular can have far-reaching
impacts on business performance, since it allows a wide variety of
participants to be involved in documenting, improving and
implementing business processes across the enterprise. Since
process discovery is focused on collaborative content creation, the
benefits are most closely aligned with more generic social software
tools, such as enterprise wikis and blogs. Deloitte, in a recent
report on social software for business performance, discusses how
social software can significantly enhance business performance in
the short-term, and can be transformational in the long term. They
highlight several capabilities of social software that can contribute
to enterprise-wide adoption and transformation:6


Preservation of institutional memory, allowing for discovery
and reuse in other areas. This serves a similar purpose to
traditional knowledge management, but is focused on the
collaborative creation of knowledge rather than the capture
and publication of existing knowledge.



Facilitation of cross-silo collaboration, allowing knowledge
and information exchange to transcend enterprise
hierarchies or boundaries.



Harnessing distributed knowledge, to bring together skills
from different areas to drive innovation.

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

Identifying emerging opportunities for innovation through
insight into exception-handling trends, and serendipitous
encounters with information and resources that may be
applied within an ever-changing business environment.

These capabilities are key in collaborative process discovery: a
centralized process model repository preserves institutional

memory, and widely-available tools facilitate collaboration across
business units and even with other organizations. As the
community forms around the collaborative process discovery tools,
new uses will be discovered for process discovery and management,
and workers from different areas will more easily lend their
expertise to projects that bear some similarity to their own. This
creates a network effect – where something becomes more valuable
as more people use it – causing an exponential increase in
potential performance improvement.
There can be barriers to collaborative process discovery, as seen in
social software studies of content creation in wiki environments. In
some cases, information hoarding is perceived as a source of power,
decreasing the motivation to openly share knowledge. Less skilled
workers may be reluctant to participate because they don’t want to
appear unknowledgeable, particularly if their work is visible to a
wider audience, including their management. There can also be a
perception that local processes are so unique that there is little to
be learned from collaborating with other departments. These are
primarily cultural barriers, and can usually be surmounted with a
combination of management directives and specific targeted
process discovery projects to show the value of collaboration.
The tools themselves can also help break down barriers to
collaboration across an enterprise by providing process model
visualizations suitable to the worker’s role and skill level: workers
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unfamiliar with more comprehensive process modeling notations
such as BPMN may view a simplified perspective of the model, and
add their feedback using typed comments rather than having to
use less-familiar graphical tools. Providing this in a web-based
environment using existing enterprise authentication makes the
tools available to all without cumbersome installation and signup

procedures, allowing everyone to have a voice in identifying and
improving processes.
Finally, adoption of the collaborative process discovery tools and
methods can be further promoted by encouraging direct access to
models in a repository for all levels of users, even if they are not
involved in process discovery. For example, sending a link to a
process model in the repository for review rather than a document
containing a static picture or description of the model, requires
management and other senior reviewers – often reluctant adopters
of new technology – to use the tools and gain appreciation for the
benefits of collaboration. In conjunction with this, limiting access
to other non-collaborative process repositories, such as static Visio
files on shared network drives, once their contents have been
migrated to the collaborative platform will help to reinforce
adoption. This will help the shared process repository to become
the primary source when anyone is looking for process model
information.

Collaborative Process Execution: Reinforcing
Enterprise Transformation Through
Widespread Process Involvement
Collaborative process discovery is a key starting point for achieving
enterprise process transformation, but still only involves a
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relatively small portion of the entire workforce. Runtime process
collaboration can propagate this transformation through
widespread involvement of a much higher number of people.

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Runtime collaboration and dynamic modeling are often considered
to be the same capabilities in a BPM system; although they are
highly related, they are not identical7: runtime collaboration is the
activity of adding participants to a process instance during runtime

who were not part of the original process design, while dynamic
modeling is the activity of modifying the model for a process
instance, usually to add one or more new tasks to the process.
Although dynamic modeling will almost always include adding new
participants, the inverse is not necessarily true: new participants
may be added to existing process tasks without changing the
topology of the original model. Runtime collaboration, in its
simplest form, allows a user to add collaborators to his assigned
task with others, without changing the process flow: he expands
the visibility of that task to others, and collects their responses and
decisions as part of the task history. This is critical for processes
that are regulated or audited for compliance, where it’s important
to know who was involved in decision-making on each process
instance.
There can be resistance to runtime collaboration, particularly from
management that has a firm top-down control mindset. However,
attempting overly-strict management control of runtime process
collaboration leads to a loss of control: the collaboration will just
move to unmonitored, unmanaged methods such as e-mail or
telephone, and there will be no audit history in the BPMS of those
activities. Providing runtime collaboration capabilities allows
knowledge workers – who often understand better than the process
designers who should be involved to complete a process – to
improve the quality of the work completed, based on their skills
and experience.
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In addition to allowing for audited inclusion of unplanned
participants in a process instance, runtime collaboration provides
additional benefits: first, the process execution variations can be
captured as feedback to process improvement, so that if a specific
role or participant is always added during runtime, that could be
added to the underlying process model, reducing the runtime effort

for this task in the future. Secondly, involving people who would
not normally use the BPMS exposes them to the benefits of BPM
without mandating their involvement in the process: just as with
casual process discovery involvement, those who are occasionally
(and collaboratively) involved with processes in a BPMS during
runtime will begin to understand the benefits that could accrue to
their own business areas from BPM.

Process Event Streams: Increasing Visibilty
Through Social Streaming
Social event streaming, popularized by Twitter and Facebook as a
method for following many people’s activities as a series of short
message updates, is being adopted in business applications as a
way of not just following people, but of following business events
and activities that may be of interest. In the world of social BPM,
this usually takes two forms:


Event streams for process discovery or modeling projects.
Someone may choose to “watch” a particular process model
or project, and receive updates for changes made to the
project. Alternatively, following a keyword would result in
updates for projects, models and other materials that use
that keyword within the process repository. This will often
be used by a modeling participant who wants to track other
people’s input, and make updates or comments on the

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process model when required.


Event streams for executing processes. Someone may
“watch” a particular class of process instances, and receive
updates whenever one of those is created or when specific
milestones are reached. This will often be used to monitor
specific process types, although can also be used to notify a
participant when their input is required.

Typically, a process event within a stream will include a direct link
to the underlying initiator of the event – the the process model or
project within the modeling environment in the first situation, or
the process instance within the runtime environment in the second
– allowing for the recipient to easily click through in order to
participate.
The short message nature of the event stream – often derided in
the consumer platforms – is actually a critical feature, since it
simplifies the information into an easily-digestible update, and
allows the stream to be formatted into a mobile device application,
or even sent via SMS messages. This pushes the boundary of
process monitoring via event streams to include anyone within an
organization, on the monitoring platform of their choice.

Collaboration in BPM Communities: Creating
the Basis for Future Growth in Enterprise
Transformation
Institutionalizing the practice of process collaboration for growing
business transformation is where BPM communities come into play,
both internal centers of excellence (CoE) and external BPM
communities. These communities help to spread process
collaboration through a number of capabilities:

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Easy availability and training on collaborative process
discovery tools. This not only assists projects with process
discovery, but can serve as an easy-to-use BPM education
tool for a widespread enterprise audience with minimal

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effort.


Process model repositories of existing enterprise processes.
This facilitates process model sharing, and helps identify
similar functions in different business areas that are

candidates for consolidation, further transforming enterprise
functionality.


BPM reference and training materials. This typically a
combination of internal best practices and external reference
materials, and may span both an internal CoE and one or
more external BPM communities.



A directory of internal process experts available for
assistance with projects. This should include BPM tool
experts, process improvement experts, and business
practitioners who have experienced a process improvement
project first-hand.

A BPM community supporting collaborative process discovery and
runtime helps to further propagate these activities across the
enterprise, transforming them into mainstream practices.

Scaling A BPM Initiative With Social
Collaboration
Social BPM can help to scale a BPM initiative from a single project
to broad enterprise transformation. Although many factors are
involved, there are a variety of techniques and best practices that
you can adopt to help it along:


Remove technological barriers by selecting web-based tools
that don’t require downloads or browser upgrades, and that

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use existing authentication so that no signups are required.


Err on the side of openness, making all processes, event
streams, information and tools available to everyone on
every platform by default and without explicit permission.
This reduces logistical barriers, increases the network effect
by facilitating process reuse across business units, and

sends the message that management considers this to be an
essential service.


Use collaborative process discovery tools from the beginning,
and use them to share process designs with all levels of
users. When sharing process models, provide direct links to
the models in the repository for review and commenting,
rather than using static snapshots or exports. This will
familiarize more people with collaborative process discovery
and its benefits.



To reduce barriers presenting in acquiring and installing onpremise software, consider a software-as-a-service solution
for some or all social BPM functionality. For example, IBM
Blueworks Live provides collaborative process discovery, and
also supports a BPM community.



Migrate existing process models into the collaborative
process repository, and remove access to non-collaborative
repositories. This will reinforce the use of the collaboration
platform for process discovery and documentation.



Discourage use of email for runtime process collaboration.
Since this is often done between front-line workers and
supervisors, enlist the supervisors to assist with
encouraging and training workers on using runtime
collaboration features.



Embed appropriate process event streams on the intranet to
familiarize people with the appearance and use of event
streams.

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

Replace process notifications and periodic reports with
filtered event streams, where possible.



Reward individual’s involvement in internal and external
BPM communities by including the amount and quality of
involvement as a performance appraisal factor.

All of these activities require rethinking the concept of “control”
within your organization: control no longer means that
management dictates every action that every employee takes, but
rather that appropriate levels of control are given to everyone so
that they can control their environment and make it most effective
for completing their tasks at hand. This paradigm shift strikes at
the core of top-down organizational management and may meet
resistance at all levels, but has the ability to provide the cultural
shift required for enterprise transformation.

Summary
The combination of collaborative capabilities discussed in this
paper enables true enterprise process transformation:


Collaborative process discovery allows a wide variety of
participants to be involved in process design.



Runtime collaboration allow anyone to become involved in a
process, at the request of the knowledge workers who are
tasked with completing the process, in order to facilitate its
completion.



Process event streams allow anyone in an organization to
track and participate in processes, from anywhere; and



Process communities capture and spread knowledge about
process improvement across the enterprise.

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The benefits: knowledge workers leverage their tacit knowledge of
other’s skills and experience to involve them at the right point in a
business process, and everyone fine-tunes the flood of information
that comes their way so that they are better able to manage their
important tasks. Furthermore, by bringing these capabilities to a
wide audience within an organization, not only individual process
projects see the benefits, but the network effect comes into play to
increase these benefits exponentially.

About the Author
Sandy Kemsley is an independent analyst, application architect
and blogger, specializing in business process management and
Enterprise 2.0. During her career of more than 20 years, she has
started and run successful product and service companies,
including a desktop workflow and document management product
company and a 40-person services firm implementing BPM and ecommerce solutions, and held the position of BPM evangelist for a
major BPM vendor.
Currently, she practices as a BPM industry analyst and architect,
performing engagements for end-user organizations and BPM
vendors. She writes the popular “Column 2” BPM blog at
www.column2.com, is a contributing author on other business and
social media-related blogs, and is a featured speaker on BPM and
its impact on business.

1

O’Reilly, T. What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for

the Next Generation of Software, www.oreillynet.com, 30 September 2005.
2

Carr, N. The Big Switch, 2008.

3

McAfee, A. “Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration”, MIT

Sloan Management Review, Vol. 47, No. 3, Spring 2006.
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4

Kemsley, S. “Enterprise 2.0 Meets Business Process Management”,

Handbook on Business Process Management, Springer, 2010.
5

Olding, E.. Social BPM: Getting to Doing, Gartner Research, 2011.

6

Miller, M., Marks, A., Decoulode, M. Social software for business

performance, Deloitte Development LLC, 2011.

7

Kemsley, S. “Runtime Collaboration and Dynamic Modeling in BPM:

Allowing the Business to Shape Its Own Processes on the Fly”, Cutter IT
Journal, Volume 23, No. 2, February 2010.

IBM Addendum
IBM brings Social BPM to life through its collaborative process
discovery, documentation and light weight automation offering,
IBM Blueworks Live. With a simple and intuitive yet rich interface
built to support different skill levels and delivered conveniently and
affordably via the cloud, IBM Blueworks Live significantly reduces
the barriers of entry of traditional BPM tools. This makes the case
for adopting BPM practices in any organization extremely
compelling.
Where IBM Blueworks Live excels is in enabling the scaling of the
BPM discipline across the organization once adopted. Built on a
backbone of collaboration features, IBM Blueworks Live allows
team members to subscribe to and be kept informed about
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processes or topics they are in, to comment on other people’s work,
to share best practices or participate in real time sharing sessions
where processes are discovered and mapped on a virtual
whiteboard by virtual teams, co-located or not. This creates an
environment in which people from diverse parts of the organization
can contribute their unique perspective to process improvement
initiatives; it is this diversity of opinion that ensures better

processes emerge. As a secondary effect of engaging in
conversations about process in a virtual water cooler, IBM
Blueworks Live customers benefit from having their collective
knowledge preserved in a shared repository that they can mine for
valuable insights at any point.
There is a lot of value in engaging the entire organization in the
discovery and modeling of processes as well as in ensuring that
process changes are communicated in real time. However, there is
just as much leverage an enterprise can get out of applying the
rules of social networking to process execution. To that extent, IBM
Blueworks Live allows its customers to automate simple workflows
consisting of checklists or approval chains and gives the process
participants the power at any point to comment on the work being
done as part of particular process instances or to reassign work to
the appropriate parties. This ensures the right process is being
executed by the right participants at the right time.
With time, IBM Blueworks Live has become the engine behind a
cultural shift in organizations that have embraced it, where
process improvement has transitioned from point solutions to a
discipline of continuous process improvement – which is the real
promise of social BPM. Sign up for a free trial today at
http://www.blueworkslive.com/
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Leveraging social bpm for enterprise transformation

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