Social BPM: Definition

Congrats to Gartner’s Elise Olding for joining the blogosphere.
I’m looking forward to hear her views on BPM.

Elise states that she is currently focusing on Social BPM and organizational change.

So… What is Social BPM?

I’ve seen the phrase “social media” used in many BPM related posts, so I looked it up.
I assumed that social media was associated with the world of PR and marketing.
It turns out that it’s a business and enterprise strategy.
I’ve got a feeling that “Social BPM” is actually “Social Media” but with a BPM twist…
So, how do we define Social BPM?

Gartner’s Anthony Bradley definition is a good starting point:
He defines social media as a set of technologies and channels targeted at forming and enabling a potentially massive community of participants to productively collaborate.

The key to social media really is effective mass collaboration.
Twitter, Wikipedia, YouTube, Yammer, Facebook and microblogging are considered social media because of their potential for mass collaboration.
The key is in its potential.
E-mail is not considered social media.

Social media isn’t about the number of people who can get information but the number of people who can effectively collaborate around information. A book is not collaborative so no matter how many people read it, it won’t be social media.

IT tools to support collaboration have existed for decades. But social-media technologies, such as social networking, wikis and blogs, enable collaboration on a much grander scale and support tapping the power of the collective in ways previously unachievable.

The real impact of social media in the BPM world is in catalyzing the collective to collaborate.