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

The Play Your Process Method for Business Process-Based Digital Game Design

Serious games have been understood as a useful tool to engage, educate and train individuals in many areas. They are also suitable for the business processes management area where it is expected that business-process-based digital games can bring together players (process actors) to better understand and learn organizational business processes. This paper presents a game design method for the development of serious games which aims to provide business process understanding to players, as well as to allow them to reflect on process challenges and difficulties. The design of serious business process games requires game designers to have business process modeling skills and instructions on how to represent business process elements in the game context. This research was conducted using the Design Science Research Methodology, and addresses the challenge of providing a method for the design of serious business process games. The method receives business process models as input and comprises steps to (i) map business process elements into game design elements, game design and development, and (ii) evaluate games with game designers, process actors, and game players. In order to validate the method, a set of games was built and evaluated with players. The designed games were evaluated as to adequate quality, although fun and entertainment can still be improved, and players´ understanding regarding process increase after games are playe

A framework for social BPM based on social tagging

Traditional Business Process Management (BPM) has a number of limitations. The first one is the typical separation between process design and execution, which often causes discrepancies between the processes as they are designed and the way in which they are actually executed. Additionally, because of this separation, valuable first-hand knowledge generated during process execution may remain unused during process design and also prevented to be shared within the organisation. Social BPM, which predicates to integrate social software into the BPM lifecycle, has emerged as an answer to such limitations. Although there have been a number of approaches to Social BPM, they have not been able to address all the issues of traditional BPM. This thesis proposes a novel Social BPM framework in which social tagging is used to capture process knowledge emerging during the enactment and design of the processes. Process knowledge concerns both the type of activities chosen to fulfil a certain goal (i.e. what needs doing), and the skills and experience of users in executing specific tasks (i.e. skills which are needed to do it). Such knowledge is exploited by recommendation tools to support the design and enactment of future process instances. This framework overcomes the limitations of traditional BPM systems as it removes the barrier between the design and execution of the processes and also enables all users to be part of the different phases of the BPM lifecycle. We first provide an analysis of the literature to position our research area, and then we provide an overview of our framework discussing its specification and introducing a static conceptual model of its main entities. This framework is then elaborated further with a more dynamic model of the behaviour and, in particular, of the role and task recommendations, which are supported by social tagging. These mechanisms are then applied in a running example. Finally the framework is evaluated through the implementation of a prototype and its application in a case study. The thesis ends with a discussion about the different evaluation approaches of the proposed framework, limitations of our framework and future research