A Strategy for Merging Social Software with Business Process Support

Abstract

Contemporary social software and business process support systems utilize different architectural principals. While social software employs the idea of shared spaces for communication/collaboration, most of the contemporary business process support systems employ a workflow engine to coordinate the work of people engaged in the given business process. There are two alternatives when developing a system that provides business process support enhanced with properties of social software. One alternative is to create a mixed shared spaces/workflow architecture. The other alternative is to find a way of both type of systems using the same architectural principle, either shared spaces, or workflow, before trying to merge the two types of systems into one. The paper explores the second alternative, namely, first, moving business process support to the shared spaces architecture, and then adding features typical for social software. The paper discusses the role of shared spaces in business process support systems, sets requirements on their structure and usage, and outlines potential benefits of using shared spaces from the business point of view. Then, the paper shows how the requirements set on the structure and usage of the shared spaces can be implemented in practice, and how typical features such as blogs/forums found in social software can be naturally introduced into a business process support system.