The Impact of Social Business Process Management on Policy-making in e-Government

The combination of social media and Business Process Management (BPM) has given rise to the emerging field of “social BPM”. The new devel-opment of social BPM is expected to provide bene-fits like flexibility for knowledge-intensive pro-cesses, like policy-making. The goal of this paper is to understand the impact of social BPM on poli-cy-making. We first present a literature survey showing that social BPM is a new and emerging research area and limited attention has been giv-en to social BPM in e-government. The literature reviews showed a lack of empirical research into the accomplished benefits of social BPM. To bridge this gap, a comprehensive case study in a Dutch government social BPM platform was con-ducted. While not all the benefits suggested in the literature were identified in the case study, nega-tive impact of social BPM were also found. A ten-sion was found between accomplishing flexibility and accountability and user efficiency