In the absence of context, Enterprise 2.0 is often a "technology in search of a problem". Enterprise 2.0 is infinitely more effective when delivered in the context of business processes.
So - what stops organizations from embracing Social BPM?
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Not understanding the opportunity cost of not embracing social BPM
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Perception that integration between systems is complex and costly
Insight into both points will provide the perspective needed to understand if Social BPM is valuable for your organization.
Social BPM Value
Coupling unstructured collaboration with processes, allows companies to place a square peg in a round hole - information that once struggled to fit into the confines of swim lanes and statically defined steps can be managed directly in and around process steps, decreasing cycles that result in cost savings.
Benefits inherent to Social BPM
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Asynchronous - a significant number of team decisions will no longer require gathering an entire team together for phone conferences, as communication can occur as possible. Additionally, flights and timezones now lessen their impact on moving processes along.
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Relevant Peers Automatically Included - loose communication between the process and social elements supporting it natively enable process participants access to appropriate collaborative spaces aligned to their processes.
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Advanced Consensus Management - collaboration tied to a step in a business process is ideal for tracking consensus-based activities from corporate boards.
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Leverage and Capture Tacit Knowledge - it is tough to deny the value of capturing tacit knowledge, but capture is generally only done with concerted effort and at the expense of regular productivity on everyday minute-to-minute tasks. With the inherent capture of this knowledge in Social BPM, never again will people have to wonder why a certain decision arrived at.
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Ad-hoc Workflow - spawn additional process steps as needed from within the collaborative environment, this makes it possible to associate actions requiring escalation directly within the existing process and context of the collaboration.
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Innate Governance - post-process completion the materials can be archived or destroyed, as noted in a retention policy that accompanies the process.
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Auditing and Analytics - BPM platforms generally already contains this ability, but loose track of ad-hoc collaboration that occurs outside of their walls. This renders the BPM analytics and auditing capabilities incomplete, Social BPM makes it possible to obtain a complete picture of activities.
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Anywhere - a sizable number of BPM and collaborative tools already contain interfaces for multiple channels. This frees users up to interact with processes any place or time.
Be Neighbors - No Cohabitation Needed
There is no need for the systems to be tightly coupled. A low cost, loosely coupled system is all that is needed to be effective.
Access to Enterprise 2.0 information from external applications - a marquee characteristic of E2.0 technologies - enables Business Process Management (BPM) technologies to incorporate social and collaborative elements into processes. This drastically increases the effectiveness of both technologies at solving business challenges.
What are We Waiting For?
If you are dealing with complex exception processing , research and development activities, consensus-based decision making, Social BPM will provide immediate value to your organization.
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