Social Business Process Management and Knowledge Intensive Processes

Business process management (BPM) is a worldwide spread holistic management discipline which increases organizational performance by managing its business processes. A number of researchers indicate the need for further examination of the role of organizational culture in BPM and its maturity. In addition, there has been a recent development of social BPM as an effort to overcome the traditional BPM limitations by using social software for managing the organizations’ business processes and increasing collaboration between BPM project teams. Therefore, we conducted a case study in one Croatian IT company which operates as a consultant company and deals with software implementation. Since their processes are knowledge intensive, they are not always formal and structured so social BPM helps the company with process change and optimization. The aim of this paper is to examine the role of organizational culture and social software usage on BPM maturity in the observed company. This work is licensed under a&nbsp;Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.</p

Social Business Process Management: Croatian IT Company Case Study

Background: Social business process management is an integration of social software into the business process management (BPM). Its main goal is to overcome the limitations of classical BPM by applying social software principles within the BPM lifecycle. Since BPM is a holistic discipline it is important to also include cultural and social aspects into BPM studies. Objectives: The main aim of this paper is to examine the link between organizational culture, social software usage and BPM maturity in the observed company. Methods/Approach: A case study methodology has been used for this study. An interview has been conducted in combination with a survey approach. Results: Results of the research revealed a high usage of social BPM within the observed company in combination with a high level of BPM maturity and a clan organizational culture. Conclusions: The observed IT company has knowledge intensive processes and uses social BPM to deal with the process change and optimization. The clan culture is, by its characteristics, a favourable organizational culture for social BPM

Bringing Together BPM and Social Software

Traditional BPM approaches are well understood for hierarchical organizations that cope with highly repetitive and well-defined processes. Unfortunately, they do not work well for the most prevalent types of processes and exclude most of the employees from participation. Especially collaborative ad-hoc processes in a team-based organization are not covered by BPM methods. Social software is a widely accepted and promising approach to support participation but lacks mechanisms for controlling processes. The paper presents a novel approach using roles. Based on a systematic literature review, this paper contributes a solution-architecture for collaborative BPM and presents collaboration patterns expressed through role models. This helps overcoming the model-reality-divide and lost innovation in the business process modeling area. Furthermore, role-model based collaboration patterns can be used to monitor and control collaborative ad-hoc processes