Business Process Management Goes Social

Mark J

Updated · Jun 28, 2010

Business process management has always been kind of a staid, scientific approach to organizational development, but according to this Fast Forward Blog article, a new discipline is emerging that fuses the openness and transparency of social with the process-oriented sensibilities of BPM.


“BPM’s heritage goes back to the ‘legacy [Michael] Hammer and [James] Champy’ style business process re-engineering; focusing on idea of re-engineering opportunities being identified by management. So management is coming in and saying ‘this is the way we can improve those specific processes — and then having those processes changed and automated by technologists before pushing it down on front-line workers. We saw the results of that. The front-line workers did not accept the final process.

“Social BPM may change this short-circuited process, Richardson says. As a result, a revolution is underway. ‘What were seeing in the process world is this idea of process populism,’ he explains. ‘Last year, when I would speak with process pros or business stakeholders, they almost sounded frustrated, almost sounded like they had pitchforks in their hands. They’re going to IT and saying ‘we want more control. we’re starting to see more demand from business, instead of relying on IT.'”

Read the Full Story at Fast Forward Blog

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