Social software is a new paradigm that is spreading quickly in society, organizations and economics. More and more enterprises use social software to improve their business processes and create new business models. Social software provides new interaction patterns that allow to integrate more stakeholders in a broader way and to design business processes in a completely new way. These four patterns are:
• 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.
• Egalitarianism Egalitarianism is the equal handling of all contributors of a business process. 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.
• Value co-creation Social software is based on the idea, that value-creation is a mutual process. Thus both service producer and consumer (or better prosumer) cooperate in order co-create value.
Applying these four patterns to business processes creates huge chances for the design, implementation and operation of business processes. Social software is used to communicate with the customer increasingly in a bi-directional manner. Companies integrate customers into product development using social software to capture ideas for new products and features. Mass production is more and more replaced by the individualized provisioning of services and products. Thus social software establishes learning relationships with customers and stakeholders. Inside companies, hierarchical structures are more and more dissolved and replaced by a culture of trust. The exchange of knowledge and information is improved. Innovations and decisions are created socially and not by single experts and managers.
Combining social software and business process management benefits a lot from the recent advances of data processing, subsumed as Big Data. Today large amounts of semi-structured and unstructured data as created by social software can be processed. Based on the analysis of this data, social software is able to influence business process (management) significantly.
| Event: | September 7, 2014-September 11, 2014 |