Social Business Process Management Approaches

A Comparative Study

Hadjer Khider

and Amel Benna

1,2

Department of Information Systems and Multimedia Systems,CERIST, Algiers, Algeria

Computer Science Department, USTHB University, Algiers, Algeria

Keywords:

BPM, Social BPM, Social Software, BPM Lifecycle.

Abstract:

The rapid development of web 2.0 has led fundamental changes and has offered huge opportunities in the

way the business process models are made available to individuals and organizations. Indeed, in order to

enhance their traditional Business Process Management (BPM), organizations are looking increasingly to use

these web 2.0 technologies. The social software easiness of use and their distinct features (weak ties, implicit

knowledge, knowledge sharing, etc.) has recently led the emergence of the social BPM approaches. In this

paper, we discuss the interaction of social software with BPM and provide a comparative study between social

business process approaches for each business process life cycle phase; we then propose how, in each phase

of a business process life cycle, a BPM can capitalize on social software.

1 INTRODUCTION

The rapid development of web 2.0 has led funda-

mental changes and has offered huge opportunities in

the way the business process models are made avail-

able to individuals and organizations. Indeed, Web

2.0 platforms have favored the development of the

social software, this social software supports vari-

ous actors in the production of content generated by

the user developing and maintaining social relation-

ships, promotes interaction and collaboration, sup-

ports the communication and the collaboration be-

tween users and increases the scope of interactions

(Graupner et al., 2012).

At the same time, the business is in fast evolution;

some companies and organizations need to commu-

nicate directly with their partners and customers and

to quickly adapt the results to the daily activities. In

response to these challenges of performance, of com-

petition and volatility of the market, it is widely rec-

ommended that the business processes of these com-

panies integrate social web (Brambilla et al., 2012).

Indeed, the business Process Management (BPM)

is designed to support the management of business

processes in organizations. Its objective is to make

efﬁcient, ﬂexible and competitive business while pro-

ducing goods and the quality services at a lower cost

to users (Weske, 2007). Asocial software can en-

hance business processes by improving the exchange

of knowledge and information, and by speeding up

the decision making process. It can also be used to

overcome the shortcomings of traditional approaches

of BPM (Schmidt and Nurcan, 2008). Social BPM

combines social software with BPM in order to opti-

mize and improve the efﬁciency of traditional BPM. It

aims to make interactions and participation, on inter-

nal and external plan to the enterprise level, loosened

in order to maximize collaboration in a larger com-

munity.

The contribution of this paper is to present a com-

parative study between the most referenced social

BPM approaches and to propose how in each phase of

a business process lifecycle, a BPM can capitalize on

social softwares. The rest of the paper is organized as

follow: Section 2 provides an overall understanding

of the concepts related to the business process life-

cycle. Section 3 evaluates social BPM approaches in

the different BPM lifecycle phases and proposes our

position statement. Section 4 is conclusion.

2 BUSINESS PROCESS

MANAGEMENT LIFECYCLE

The business processes lifecycle describes the se-

quence of activities leading to the implementation of

a process management approach in an organization.

340

Khider H. and Benna A..

Social Business Process Management Approaches - A Comparative Study.

DOI: 10.5220/0005465103400345

In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS-2015), pages 340-345

ISBN: 978-989-758-098-7

 2015 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

As described in Figure 1, four phases characterize the

lifecycle of a business process (Weske, 2007):

• Design and Analysis phase: in this phase, the

business processes are identiﬁed, validated and

modeled;

• Conﬁguration phase: in this phase, the business

process is detailed by combining the roles to spe-

ciﬁc players in the business and involving a ma-

chine or a program activity;

• Enactment phase: in this phase, the activities are

linked one after the other by following the pro-

cess deﬁnition. In this case, the process and its

activities are instantiated. These are performed by

professional actors according to their role in the

process;

• Evaluation phase: This phase, allows to analyze

the process qualitatively and quantitatively in or-

der to propose possible improvements of the pro-

cess.

Figure 1: Business Process Management lifecycle.

3 EVALUATION OF SOCIAL BPM

APPROACHES

To evaluate social BPM approaches, we organize this

section as follows: We ﬁrst deﬁne evaluation criteria

(Section 3.1), followed by the description of the so-

cial BPM approaches (section 3.2). Then, we evaluate

these approaches (Section 3.3) and present our posi-

tion statement and we propose how BPM can capital-

ize from social software in each phase of its life cycle

in the (Section 3.4).

3.1 The Evaluation Criteria

In this section, we present the social criteria, deﬁned

by Brambilla (Brambilla et al., 2012), and that form

the foundation of our comparative study:

• Exploitation of weak ties and implicit knowledge:

the aim is to discover and to use the knowledge

and the informal relationships in order to improve

the execution of the activity.

• Transparency: the goal is to make the decision

procedures of the process more visible to stake-

holders.

• Participation: the goal is to involve a wider com-

munity in order to sensitize users in contributing

to the activity they want in process design and ex-

ecution.

• Activity distribution: the objective is to assign an

activity to a wider set of actors or to ﬁnd required

contributors for its execution.

• Decision distribution: the goal is to generate opin-

ions that help to making a decision .The users will

not only participate by giving their input and be

involved in the process design, but they would

also all play a major role in decision making.

• Social feedback: Having a social feedback is to

acquire information from a wider set of stakehold-

ers for process improvement.

• Sharing knowledge: the aim is to disseminate

knowledge to improve the execution of tasks, and

at the extreme, it could be to promote mutual as-

sistance between users in order to avoid making

costly activities.

3.2 Social BPM Approaches

Recent research on BPM (Qu et al., 2008), (Schmidt

and Nurcan, 2008), (Brambilla et al., 2012), (Rangiha

and Karakostas, 2013), have been proposed to inte-

grate elements of social software in the BPM life cy-

cle. In this section, the most referenced approaches

combining social software with BPM are presented

based on the business process life cycle and the eval-

uation criteria described in section 3.1.

The approach proposed in (Brambilla et al., 2012)

called BPM4PEOPLE, is based on the integration of

social software to the BPM in order to improve orga-

nizational effectiveness by using the potential of so-

cial software. This approach is based on model driven

architecture or MDA. A speciﬁc notation is deﬁned by

Brambilla et al in (Brambilla et al., 2011) to describe

the social behavior of BPM (deﬁned as extension of

BPMN 2.0). This notation allows the annotation of

SocialBusinessProcessManagementApproaches-AComparativeStudy

341

Table 1: Evaluation of Brambilla´s approach.

BPM life

cycle

Exploitation

of weak ties

Decision

distribution

Sharing

knowledge

Trans-

parency

Transparency Participation Activity

distribution

Social

feedback

Design and

Analysis

phase

poll results sharing

social con-

tent, social

network

notiﬁca-

tions

poll results,

votes and

comments

Enactment

Phase

poll results,

votes and

comments

Publication

of social

content,

social

network

notiﬁca-

tions

Find skills

for activity,

assign an

activity

to social

actors

Evaluation

Phase

Comments through

a vote

on social

networks

poll results,

votes and

comments

Table 2: Evaluation of Rangiha´s approach.

BPM life

cycle

Exploitation

of weak ties

Decision

distribution

Sharing

knowledge

Trans-

parency

Transparency Participation Activity

distribution

Social

feedback

Design and

Analysis

phase

solicitation

of users

networks

Manager

returns

the ﬁnal

decision

through no-

tiﬁcations

public con-

tribution

in design

phase

poll results

Enactment

Phase

solicitation

of users

networks

through no-

tiﬁcations

public par-

ticipation

poll results

Evaluation

Phase

solicitation

of users

networks

poll results through no-

tiﬁcations

public par-

ticipation

poll results

speciﬁc tasks such as collaboration and their potential

implementation in a social network environment and

provides four main extension points:

• Social monitoring: the ability to capture social ac-

tivities and events of a social network;

• Adoption of social behavior: the ability to per-

form social activities;

• Description of social content: the ability to model

social data and content;

• Social access: the ability to use user proﬁles and

social credentials to access the BPM platform.

We summarize the social criteria for each business

process life cycle of Brambilla et al. approach (Bram-

billa et al., 2012) in table 1.

In the Goal-based modeling approach proposed in

(Rangiha and Karakostas, 2013) the user groups can

be involved in collaboration in both the business pro-

cess execution phase, in order to achieve ﬁxed goals,

and in the design process. Thus, instead of developing

the processes and send them to the end users, the idea

is that end users are also involved in the design pro-

cess. The model proposed by Rangiha (Rangiha and

Karakostas, 2013)comprises the following elements:

• User-System Interaction through recommenda-

tion: To achieve a speciﬁc goal, the user is ﬂex-

ible to choose its action. The system assists users

to ensure ﬁrstly, that the actions taken lead the ex-

pected goal, and secondly that the actions can be

captured and reused in future by the social BPM.

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• Business rules: Constraints and dependencies are

the essential elements of recommendation mecha-

nism. Indeed, before to recommend or to suggest

a task, this mechanism is assisted by some busi-

ness rules.

• Social goals: As the proposed model is based on

an approach based on a goal, it is important to

specify what type of goal is referred to in the con-

text of social BPM.

We summarize the social criteria for each business

process life cycle of Rangiha et al. (Rangiha and

Karakostas, 2013) approach in table 2.

The business process models is shared and ex-

changed in Koschmider et al. approach (Koschmider

et al., 2009). Users are assisted by an existing recom-

mendation system. In this approach the use of social

networks can help users behave as expert modelers.

Two kinds of social networks are used to this end:

• A social network from a process model repos-

itory: the social network provides an organiza-

tional view of business processes.

• A social network from a recommendation history:

it shows the relationship among modelers who use

the recommendation system. The social network

is generated from its usage history.

We summarize the social criteria for each business

process life cycle phase of Koschmider et al. ap-

proach (Koschmider et al., 2009) in table 3.

An alternative solution for BPM is presented in

(Qu et al., 2008) approach. Indeed, instead of hav-

ing some experts as process creators, a Web-based ap-

plication is provided to all experts to collaborate on

the standardization and the optimization of processes.

In particular, a process of collaborative wiki, called

Cyano, is developed. It is used to publish hundreds of

processes and it is used by thousands of experts. Be-

side to be content consumers, this wiki allows users

to become content creators. The main contributions

of Qu et al. in (Qu et al., 2008) are as follows:

• Introductionof a BPM system based on social net-

works.

• The proposal of a novel social recommendation

system, SCOOP, to customize the neighbors of

user in collaboration.

• Deploy SCOOP to a production environment and

conﬁrm its success on a real data and usages

We summarize the social criteria for each business

process life cycle phase of Qu et al. approach (Qu

et al., 2008) in table 4.

3.3 The Evaluation: A Comparative

Study

This evaluation aims to answer to research question

in which phases of BPM lifecycle social BPM ap-

proaches could meet criteria presented in Section3.1.

For this comparative study we take into account the

social features for BP in the following phases of

BPM life cycle: Design, Enactment, and Evaluation.

Across the table 5, it was concluded that social BPM

approaches presented do not meet all the social crite-

ria.

Indeed, Brambilla et al. approach in (Brambilla

et al., 2012); doesnt include some social criteria such

as exploitation of weak ties, sharing knowledge and

activity distribution in design and analysis phase.

Rangiha et al. approach in (Rangiha and Karakostas,

2013) does not include sharing knowledge and activ-

ity distribution in the following phases: design and

analysis phase, enactment phase and the evaluation

phase. Also, Qu et al. approach in (Qu et al., 2008)

includes the social aspects only in the design phase.

Koschmider et al approach in (Koschmider et al.,

2009) includes the social criteria only in the design

phase and the decision distribution and participation

are not taken into account in this phase.

3.4 Our Position Statement

Following the comparative study, we concluded that

social BPM approaches presented at the top take into

account only some social criteria and only in some

phases of the business process life cycle. This section

aims to describe how BPM can capitalize from social

software in each phase of life cycle.

3.4.1 Design and Analysis Phase

As in Qu et al. approach in (Qu et al., 2008) that

meets all the social criteria in design phase, our ap-

proach will be based, in the design and analysis phase,

on weak ties, sharing knowledge and activity distribu-

tion social criteria. Indeed, in this phase, the business

processes are validated and modeled. The social soft-

ware provides new opportunities for more efﬁcient

and ﬂexible design of business processes. It can in-

tegrate stakeholders needs in a more comprehensive

way by enabling better integration of all stakehold-

ers in the validation and modeling. During this phase,

the social software can also help to more easily create

reference models.

SocialBusinessProcessManagementApproaches-AComparativeStudy

343

Table 3: Evaluation of Koschmiders approach.

BPM life

cycle

Exploitation

of weak ties

Decision

distribution

Sharing

knowledge

Trans-

parency

Transparency Participation Activity

distribution

Social feed-

back

Design and

Analysis

phase

based

on users

with same

recommen-

dations

Possibility

of spread-

ing new

models in

the model

repository

Modelers

access to

the reposi-

tory models

assign

the new

process

models

deﬁnition

to a set of

modelers

new busi-

ness pro-

cesses

models

generated

Enactment

Phase

Evaluation

Phase

Table 4: Evaluation of Qu´s approach.

BPM life

cycle

Exploitation

of weak ties

Decision

distribution

Sharing

knowledge

Trans-

parency

Transparency Participation Activity

distribution

Social

feedback

Design and

Analysis

phase

All the

experts par-

ticipate to

deﬁne new

models

taken into

account

taken into

account

expert input

is visible

all experts

can partici-

pate

between

experts

collaborative

wiki

Enactment

Phase

Evaluation

Phase

3.4.2 Enactment Phase

In this phase linking activities are performed by pro-

fessional actors according to their role in the process.

We propose to use social software to provide support

for BPM workﬂows. Indeed, in both approaches of

Qu et al in (Qu et al., 2008) and Koschmider et al in

(Koschmider et al., 2009) social criteria is neglected

in this phase. The exploitation of weak ties and social

feedback are included only in Rangiha et al. approach

in (Rangiha and Karakostas, 2013) and the sharing

knowledge and activity distribution are not taking into

account in both Brambilla et al in (Brambilla et al.,

2012) and Rangiha et al. in (Rangiha and Karakostas,

2013)approaches.

3.4.3 Evaluation Phase

To analyze the process and propose its improvements,

we propose to use social software in this phase. In-

deed, the social software can enhance the exchange

of knowledge and predicts decisions.

Few works include the social aspect in this phase.

Social criteria such as decision distribution, shar-

ing knowledge are neglected in both Brambilla et al

in (Brambilla et al., 2012) and Rangiha et al. in

(Rangiha and Karakostas, 2013) approaches. What

have been proposed are just minor contributions.

There is also much speculation that social BPM has

the greatest impact when running processes, it is im-

portant to establish a clear understanding of how the

elements of social software will be used during exe-

cution processes

4 CONCLUSIONS

The traditional BPM approaches have evolved and

ideas of integrating social software elements in the

BPM life cycle have been proposed. However, these

ideas are still in their infancy.

In this position paper we tried to identify and

study how social software and BPM can be used in

complementary ways to support collaborative work in

organizations, and then present the most referenced

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Table 5: Comparative study between Social BPM approaches.

BPM

life

cycle

Social

BPM

approach

Exploitation

of weak

ties

Decision

distribu-

tion

Sharing

knowl-

edge

Trans-

parency

Transparency Participation Activity

distri-

bution

Social

feed-

back

Design and Analysis phase

Brambilla

et al, 2012

X X X

Koschmider

et al, 2009

X X X X X

Rangiha et

al, 2013

X X X X

Qu et al,

2008

X X X X X X X

Enactment Phase

Brambilla

et al, 2012

X X X

Koschmider

et al, 2009

Rangiha et

al, 2013

X X X X

Qu et al,

2008

Evaluation Phase

Brambilla

et al, 2012

X X X

Koschmider

et al, 2009

Rangiha et

al, 2013

X X X X

Qu et al,

2008

approaches in BPM that try to integrate social soft-

ware in the different BPM lifecycle phases. An evalu-

ation of the use of social criteria in the BPM life cycle

for each approach is achieved. We ﬁnd that, social cri-

teria are not included in all BP life cycle phases and

then propose an approach that includes these social

criteria in the different BPM life cycle. As a future

work, we propose an approach which inherits the ap-

proach of (Brambilla et al., 2012) and includes the

social criteria such as weak ties, sharing knowledge

and activity distribution in both design and enactment

phases.

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