Making Business Processes More Social

Dateline: January 18, 2013

Welcome to the Friday WRAP – one thought-provoking idea to think about over the weekend.

Friend and colleague Dr. Nick Vitalari, has published a book about his research on the imperative for companies to become Elastic Enterprises.  Companies who do so can respond quickly to customer’s changing needs.  This week’s WRAP builds on Nick’s theme.  Harvard Blogger, Mark Pearson, managing drector of the Operations consulting group at Accenture, shared his thoughts on how Social Media Can Play A Role in Business Process Management.

Mark suggests that

Social media offers us a chance to improve the communications supporting process improvement. Leading organizations are already using the power of social media to shape their business process management (BPM) agendas. Although the use of social media in BPM may still be in its infancy, its potential for increasing the agility of business processes — allowing for change in the early stages of product development, for example — is immense. Social media in BPM can accomplish this in three ways: First, by collecting customer feedback and using it to adjust processes; second, by disseminating knowledge and increasing acceptance of new processes; and third, by helping identify which processes really contribute to competitive differentiation.

Social IT can make processes more responsive and those that manage them more informed.  Social tools make gathering and disseminating information easier, increasing transparency and improving processes.

Social business is a major theme of my research.  I define social business as the infusion of social capabilities into business processes (see my recent blog about that here).

How might you infuse social capabilities into your business processes?  What benefits can you imagine if you did?

That’s a WRAP!  Have a wonderful weekend.

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