A Survey on the use of Social BPM in Practice in Brazilian Organizations

Abstract

Social BPM is the combination of Business Process Management (BPM) with social and collaborative techniques for the purpose of exploring collaboration among stakeholders throughout the BPM lifecycle. Its goals are to reduce common problems in BPM by ensuring collaboration and transparency. To the best of our knowledge, there is no information on how Social BPM is being used in organizational environments and on its impacts. This study aims at showing how Brazilian organizations are using Social BPM practices and technologies. Therefore, a survey was conducted with employees from different companies in order to collect data on their usage of BPM collaborative practices. The survey received 31 replies and 3 of the respondents were also interviewed in order to provide depth to their answers and to enhance the overall understanding. The results show that collaboration happens predominantly in design, modeling, and improvement phases. Collaboration still happens mainly without formal planning and without tool support. CCS Concepts• Human-centered computing➝Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing • Applied computing➝Business process management General TermsManagement.

Social business process management in practice

“…Many authors agree that one of the main purposes of using social BPM within organizations is to enhance and facilitate collaboration among all relevant stakeholders in BPM implementation and adoption. 8,11,14,15 Therefore, the papers selected for this study have been analysed following the work of Niehaves and Plattfaut. 15 They argue that there is a lack of research on the topic, although it is a growing and developing area, and propose a conceptual framework for understanding collaborative BPM based on the observation of 37 papers.…”

“…For instance, Batista et al list several social BPM benefits, like centralized repository, knowledge management, improvement of collaboration and communication, process integration, and BPM communities for process improvement, faster decisionmaking and so on. 11 In that sense, social BPM can play an important role in risk prevention since these benefits improve stability and the response time in organizations. Moreover, it has been argued that using an information technology (IT) software tool with a built-in warning system, like BPM systems, can be a good support for risk monitoring.…”