Social technologies are transforming the Web to a place where users actively contribute to content production and opinion making. Social networking requirements are becoming a core part of the needs of modern enterprises too, which need ad-hoc Web platforms that incorporate the right set of social features for their business. This leads to the need to provide facilities and methods for developing such socially enabled applications. In this paper we propose a model-driven approach that is specifically focused on the development of Web applications that exploit social features. In particular, we describe an extension of the WebML notation (a Domain Specific Language designed to model Web applications), comprising a set of modeling concepts that encapsulate the logic of the interaction with the social platforms. Upon this, we define a set of design patterns that respond to the typical needs of enterprises and we show some sample application scenarios.

1. Model-driven Development of Social
Network-enabled Applications
Marco Brambilla, Andrea Mauri
marco.brambilla@polimi.it
marcobrambi
marcobrambi
MDWE workshop, July 25, 2012. Berlin. Colocated with ICWE 2012

2. Social Enterprise: a definition
 A Methodology for bringing more
and diverse voices into process
improvement activities [Clay
Richardson, Forrester Blogs, April
2010]
 Social BPM is a concept that
describes collaboratively designed
and iterated processes [Gartner,
Social BPM: Design by Doing, Apr
2010].
 Technically speaking: the
integration of Enterprise Systems
and social software
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3. The problem (and opportunity)
 Social Enterprise is not a technology
 It requires methodological and technical flexibility to
adapt to each organization and its surrounding
ecosystem
 Enterprise system vendors try to “stitch” some social
flavor to their standard BPM suites
 This turns into slow adoption and missed opportunities,
especially for SMEs who cannot afford a full-fledged
Enterprise solution
2

4. The mission
 Web Engineering should aim at building a method supported by
tools for the transfer of value between organizations and their
reference communities
Personal values &
objectives
SOCIAL Enterprise
Social ties
Stakeholders’
communities
Stakeholders’ Stakeholders’
communities communities
Enterprise
Organization
Shared values and goals
Activities and Rules
3

5. State of the market Emerging Opportunities
Technology, society, and work are all changing at breakneck speeds. Businesses tha
value from these changes must harness opportunities at their intersection, the hub o
 Still in its infancy, limited adoption
 Very turbulent
 Enterprise microblogging
 Tibco Tibbr, Microsoft OfficeTalk, Salesforce
 Personal processes, collaborative
development, community-based work
Technology
 IBM Blueworks Live, ArisAlignspace, Appian, ...
 Crowdsourcing It goes without saying that technological evolution has fueled every major business r
industrial. But every major business shift was spurred on by innovations that were se
 Amazon Mechanical Turk, … visible to those with keen foresight.
Currently, the ever-increasing overlap between consumer and enterprise technology
opportunities for businesses to evolve – and this continued overlap will only increase
» Cloud Computing. Cloud computing means faster, more relevant deployments o
financial burden and in a more adaptable tactical environment. Web-based servic
!
4

6. Social networks and tools
 Candidate
social platforms
 Tens of categories
 Hundreds of solutions
 Different purposes
Source: http://www.theconversationprism.com/
5

7. Requirements: sources
 The European Parliament (head of Unit of ICT Services), potential adopter
 UniCredit Leasing, potential adopter
 The Province of Brescia ( IT), potential adopter
 Acer Corporation (CH and IT), potential adopter
 Potential partner companies: Engineering (IT), Innovation Engineering (IT),
BlogMeter (IT), Atena Informatica (IT)
 Altroconsumo (IT), ONG, potential adopter
 Vel Pitar (Romania), potential adopter
 Volksbank Romania, potential adopter
 Carrefour Romania, potential adopter
 OTP Bank Romania, potential adopter
 County Council Cluj, potential adopter
 Education2000+ (ONG), potential adopter
 Junta de Extremadura (Deparment of e-Administration, ES)
 Pulso Sistemas (ES), potential partner
 Alma Technologies (ES), potential partner
 ICM (ICT department at Gov. of Madrid, ES), potential adopter
 Comune di Como (IT), potential adopter
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8. Socialization objectives
 Focus groups highlighted the following major areas
where Social Networking can help process
improvement in organizations
 Weak Ties / Tacit Knowledge – e.g. team formation
 Knowledge sharing – e.g. self-served tech support
 Social Feedback – e.g. quality monitoring
 Transparency – e.g. PA, government
 Participation – e.g. participatory budget
 Activity distribution – e.g. crowd-sourced tasks
 Decision distribution – e.g. social CRM
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9. The social enterprise background
 No matter what the platform is, you need to integrate it
 The Social Enterprise need to be implemented on top of a variety of
communication tools
 Open public social networks
 Enterprise micro-blogging platforms
 Geo-located services and social networks
 Utility services (e.g., poll management, Q&A)
 It is imperative to provide general concepts (e.g., poll) and then map
them to the technical platform of choice (e.g., Doodle)
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10. Socialization design patterns
 Walkthrough of potential scenarios with user groups
highlighted the existence of recurrent patterns
 Design patterns help understanding how to use social
network functionalities to achieve social BPM objectives:
 They capture reusable solutions to recurrent
socialization objectives:
 Dynamic enrollment
 Poll
 People / Skill search
 Social content publication
 Social sourcing (vs. crowdsourcing)
 Progress notification
 Ranking and commenting
9

11. Socialization design patterns to
objectives mapping
 Socialization objectives 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 Knowledge
Tacit Transparency Participation
distribution distribution f.back sharing
Knowledge
Dynamic enrollment X
Poll X X
People / Skill search X X X
Social content
X X
publication
Social sourcing X
Progress notification X
Ranking and
X X X X
commenting
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12. Identified and implemented social
components
1. SocialLogin unit
2. Facebook unit
3. LinkedIn unit
4. Doodle unit
5. YouTube unit
6. GoogleCalendar unit
7. Twitter unit
8. WordPress unit
9. GoogleDocs unit
10. Dropbox unit
11. GoogleDirection unit
12. Chat unit
13. Slideshare unit
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13. Application design patterns and
components usage
12

14. Step 1
Design the model
Application Model Process Model
 Define data, services, logic,  Define business
presentation details and processes managed by
user interaction the application
 WebML Notation > IFML(*)  BPMN notation
(*) the standardization process of the language is in progress within the OMG organization
13

15. Step 2
Customize the generation rules
Layout templates Custom components
 for a perfectly fine-tuned  for implementing any kind
layout, tailored to your visual of business logic,
identity integration or complex task
14

16. Social WebML components
Social components
• “Public” social network
integration
• Login
• Status update
• People search
• Tools for content
publishing and sharing
• Tools for cloud storage
• Enterprise social
• Tools for team working network integration
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17. Step 3
Generate the application
 Get a tailored, yet standard, Java Web application
User Interface
Desktop Mobile
Deploy
On-premises In the cloud
Standard
Java
Application
… Server …
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18. WebRatio runtime architecture
and extension for Social Business Logic
Browser
Client Layer
Web Server SOAP sender / listener Presentation
Layer
JSP pages
Message Message Business
JSP engine composer decomposer Layer
Unit descriptor 1
... Conversation Social BPM
WebML runtime
Manager
Unit descriptor n Components
...
Data Layer Data
XML ...
RDBMS LDAP Layer
Legenda
Processing of messages received by the site
Social networks and social APIs
Construction of messages sent by the site
(public or enterprise)
Standard components interactions
17

19. Social Components Behaviour
 WebML model of wall posting and commenting
18

20. Social Components Behaviour
 WebML model for posting (on Twitter)
19

21. Social Components Behaviour
 WebML model for voting in a poll (on Doodle)
20

22. Demonstration

23. Process specification:
Project Initiation BP
ACME is a large international sw integrator company that
develops turnkey projects for customers.
The company is organized in Business Units (BUs), each
addressing a different industry (e.g., finance, pharma,
etc).
When a new project is started, the manager of the BU of
the industry that matches the project more closely
creates the project description and defines the required
skills for the project, based on his prior experiences.
Then he defines the project staff, based on the skill list and
personnel availability, and notifies the selected
employee of his BU that will form the team.
Finally, the BU manager defines a date for the official
project kick-off in order to initiate the activity.
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24. BP Actors
 BU Manager: negotiates the project with the customer,
selects the required skills, creates the staff list, defines
the kickoff date
 BU Employee: is selected to enroll in the project,
attends the kickoff meeting
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25. Process model: as is
BU manager
Establish
Identify
project
definition &
staff no
decide skills
members
Publish
yes
Finalize Call Attend
kick-off
staff kick-off meeting
meeting
list meeting
date
ACME BU_X
Project definition
ACME employee
Join staff Confirmed date? Attend meeting
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26. Problem areas
 Project Staffing
 Staffing is done solely on the base of the BU
manager experience
 ACME employees with relevant experience may be
no longer in the BU, due to career paths, change of
country, etc..
 Valuable existing expertise is not put to profit
 Duplication of effort and scarce reuse of artifacts
 Kickoff meeting organization
 Distributed event management need to be integrated
with the Project Initiation Business Process
25

27. Process Improvement
with Social Enterprise Practices
 The process as-is is confined within the BU that
“wins” the project (owner BU)
 In the new BP, other BUs (contributor BUs)
can act as “communities of reference” to the
owner BU, offering experience with the same
customer or in similar areas
 Employees can declare their skills, irrespective of the
BU where they belong, implicitly proposing
themselves as contributors to projects in their areas
of expertise (tacit knowledge elicitation)
 Employees can endorse colleagues, based on their
past experience in projects (weak ties)
26

28. Actors of Social BPM
 Employees of other BUs (that would normally NOT
take part in the BP):
 can be identified as candidates with a search for people with
specific skills
 can propagate the invitation to people they know in the
company, can endorse selected candidates based on their past
experience
27

29. Selecting the right Social Platform
 LinkedIn
 Supports
 Enterprise closed groups
 Invitation and invitation propagation
 Skill declaration and search
 Doodle
 Supports
 Poll definition
 Poll answer
 Poll result consolidation
 Import in 3rd party platform
28

30. The to-be process: SBPM at work
 Overview:
29

31. The to-be process: SBPM at work
…
30

32. The to-be process: SBPM at work
…
31

33. SBPM at work: Architecture
Social BPM
application
(WebRatio
+ RUX-Tool)
BPM engine
32

34. Conclusions and Outlook
 Recognized need of social networking platform integration
 Mapping of business objectives to model-driven designs
 Implementation of executability of models
 Web engineering is challenged to provide effective and efficient
solutions to the problems
Future works
 Coverage of private and enterprise social networks
 Coverage of crowdsourcing platforms
33

35. Questions?
Contact:
marco.brambilla@polimi.it
marcobrambi
marcobrambi

36. Materials and links
 BPM4People Web Site
 http://www.bpm4people.org
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37. Demos
 Demonstrative videos
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qNV1Iw1oiA
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA-7GcKInyA
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ou6N7jWh0kA
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38. Standards and Training
 Joint effort of POLIMI and
WebRatio
 Standardization of the user
interaction language IFML
 Training on
social
networking
(summer
school)
37