Introduction to the First International Workshop on Business Process Management and Social Software (BPMS2 2008)

Abstract

Social software is a new paradigm for collaboration and interaction support which is spreading quickly in the society, organisations and economics. It utilizes a highly bottom-up approach to organize the collaboration and interaction of individuals. As a result, content, knowledge and software is not created by a hierarchy of experts, but by combining a multitude of contributions of independent authors/actors. Examples for such a social production are wikis, blogs, social bookmarking and tagging, etc. The paradigm of social software and social production has created a multitude of success stories such as wikipedia.org and the development of the Linux operating system. Therefore, more and more enterprises see social software and social production 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 becomes 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. Up to now, the interaction of social software and the underlying paradigm of social production with business processes have not been investigated in depth. Therefore, the objective of the workshop has been to explore how social software and social production interact with business process management, how business process management has to change to comply with social production, and how business processes may profit from social techniques.