I hesitate to coin another “social” tag – I have a lot of time for Dennis Howlett and his take on the social meme stampede seems pretty accurate. However, after spending many of the recent years implementing workflow and BPM solutions, and hearing the recent exhortations from high to “do more with less”, it’s clear that traditional workflow and BPM implementations often find it hard to keep pace with process change, let alone reflect the real business processes.

Worse still, some implementations end up changing the business process to fit in with the technological constraints in some kind of twisted “build it and they will have to come” philosophy. I think there’s a real opportunity to use some of the tools and techniques of social media to create a workflow solution that better mirrors business processes and is adapts more easily to them changing.

A workflow solution usually has (at least) the following components: process definition; state management; role resolution; notification; metrics; tracking. The trouble with conventional workflow solutions are that they are a design-time solution – roles have to be assigned to users, process steps have to be designed and fixed, states have to be defined. Unfortunately, with budgets and departments shrinking, and supervisors often having to do the work as well as manage the processes and roles never stay that fixed. Also, it’s often only after you start trying to use a process that you see where improvements can be made.

Social media tools and practices are nothing if not fluid and “run-time” and they can be used to replace the parts of a workflow solution for ad-hoc and dynamic business processes.

Why not search users’ profiles to assign tasks rather than rely on a fixed role? (“I need a French speaker to check this company report”; “I need a director grade or above to approve this purchase”; “I need someone who has reviewed a vendor proposal before to look at this document”).

Why not use collaboration tools like group chat to track progress and team spaces to pick up and assign new tasks? People could also put themselves forward to act as participants with listed “surgery hours” to balance things alongside their day jobs.

Why not use tagging (social bookmarking) to identify common processes, best practices (or anti-patterns) in the process interactions or to group a set of smaller processes together in to a case?

Most of all, why not let the process initiator or participants decide the next steps in the flow and when it is complete? (“This document’s spelling needs rechecking”; “This person’s holiday is approved”; “This post is ready to be published”). This way we can get specific and directed tasks rather than “Reapprove”, “Complete”, “Reject”.

I’m not suggesting that social workflow works for all processes. There are a lot of very well-defined processes out there with strict roles, especially in highly regulated environments, and the need to execute and audit a set of steps and for this workflow and BPM solutions are ideal. Neither am I ignoring the fact that for some organisations this will be anathema at worst or require departmental change at best. But there are some processes and organisations where this is more appropriate and cheaper than implementing a workflow solution. In my experience this is a sizable majority of the processes implemented using workflow tools.

So the next time a workflow seems an ideal implementation of a business process, it’s worth asking a few deeper questions:

• Who really does the work? Does it fall naturally in to roles or is it more of a collaborative exercise? (A clue to this is whether the process has lots of different submit-reject-resubmit loops occurring in multiple places)
• How fixed are the steps? Are there really sequential steps or do people just work on it until it’s finished?
• How likely is the business process to change (and how exposed is this process to external factors)?

Answering yes to these might give you pause for thought that the solution could be better implemented as a social workflow solution.

This is the first of a set of posts where we’ll talk about our social media architecture. We hope to be able to add to the debate with prototypes or demo versions of some of the more bespoke components in the future.