About the Conference

SCOPE

Social software is a new paradigm that is spreading quickly in society, organizations and economics. Social software has created a multitude of success stories such as wikipedia.org and the development of the Linux operating system. Therefore, more and more enterprises regard social software as a means for further improvement of their business processes and business models. For example, they integrate their customers into product development by using blogs to capture ideas for new products and features. Thus, business processes have to be adapted to new communication patterns between customers and the enterprise: for example, the communication with the customer is increasingly a bi-directional communication with the customer and among the customers. Social software also offers new possibilities to enhance business processes by improving the exchange of knowledge and information, to speed up decisions, etc. Social software is based on four principles: weak ties, social production, egalitarianism and mutual service provisioning.

• Weak ties Weak-ties are spontaneously established contacts between individuals that create new views and allow combining competencies. Social software supports the creation of weak ties by supporting to create contacts in impulse between non-predetermined individuals

• Social Production Social Production is the creation of artefacts, by combining the input from independent contributors without predetermining the way to do this. By this means it is possible to integrate new and innovative contributions not identified or planned in advance. Social mechanisms such as reputation assure quality in social production in an a posteriori approach by enabling a collective evaluation by all participants.

• Egalitarianism Egalitarianism is the attitude of handling individuals equally. Social software highly relies on egalitarianism and therefore strives for giving all participants the same rights to contribute. This is done with the intention to encourage a maximum of contributors and to get the best solution fusioning a high number of contributions, thus enabling the wisdom of the crowds . Social software realizes egalitarianism by abolishing hierarchical structures, merging the roles of contributors and consumers and introducing a culture of trust.

• Mutual Service Provisioning Social software abolishes the separation of service provider and consumer by introducing the idea, that service provisioning is a mutual process of service exchange. Thus both service provider and consumer (or better prosumer) provide services to one another in order co-create value . This mutual service provisioning contrasts to the idea of industrial service provisioning, where services are produced in separation from the customer to achieve scaling effects.

Up to now, the interaction of social software and its underlying paradigms with business processes have not been investigated in depth. Therefore, the objective of the workshop is to explore how social software interacts with business process management, how business process management has to change to comply with weak ties, social production, egalitarianism and mutual service, and how business processes may profit from these principles.

TOPICS OF INTEREST

1. New opportunities provided by social software for BPM

• How can business processes fit to business models based on the paradigm of social production?
• Which new possibilities for the design of business processes are created by social software?
• How are trust and reputation established in business processes using social software?
• Are there business processes which require sociality, especially when they are not well defined (as production workflows) but collaborative or ad hoc?
• How do weak ties, social production, egalitarianism and mutual service provisioning influence the design of business processes?

• What is the impact on conceptual models for those categories of business processes which are not well-defined or that we do not wish to freeze using classical business process enactment systems for instance?

• Engineering next generation of business processes: BPM 2.0 ?

• Do we need new BPM methods and/or paradigms to cope with social software?

• Is there an influence of weak ties, social production, egalitarianism and mutual service provisioning on BPM methods themselves?
• Are there any similarities or relationships with process mining techniques and also with workflow control and role patterns?
• Which phases of the BPM lifecycle (Design, Deployment, Performance, and Evaluation) are affected the most by social software?
• How can BPM profit from using social software?
• Which types of social software can be used in which phases of the BPM lifecycle?

3.Business process implementation support by social software

• Which kinds of social software can be used to implement business processes?
• Which categories of business processes can profit from social software?
• How does social software interact with WFMS or other business process support systems?
• How can we use Wikis, Blogs etc. to support business processes?
• What new kinds of business knowledge representation are offered by social production?

Conference Dates