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Social BPM Dramatically Increases Worker Productivity

Appian Contributor
August 15, 2011

Social BPMlooks a lot like Facebook and Twitter but, unlike those platforms, it is dramatically increasing worker productivity.

What is Social BPM? It's an activity-stream interface that allows workers to more effectively manage their business processes. You can use Social BPM to handle critical events,collaborate with subject matter experts, initiate processes and consume personalized information; all with pinpoint enterprise security and auditability in a zero-training interface.

Below is an example showing how an ERP system can automatically post critical time-sensitive information to Appian's Social BPM interface.

So why does Social BPM work, besides the intuitive interface? The biggest reason is that, unlike consumer social collaboration tools like Facebook, Social BPM doesn't rely on people to post the important information. Instead, Social BPM obtains most of its critical data by integrating with running processes already being managed by your BPM softwareplatform. Toquoteour CEO Matt Calkins: "Social may be the delivery mechanism, but the payload is business".So, when key process-managed events occur (or don't) such as a new customer on-boarding, an executive approval, or a delayed invoice payment, for examples, it is seamlessly fed into your Social BPM interface and targeted with pinpoint relevancy to your workers. Workers don't have to pull information; it is intelligently and automatically pushed to them instead.

Not surprisingly, some of the biggest adopters of Social BPM are new employees. After all, what better way to learn how the business functions than to see it in action? With Social BPM new hires learn how decisions are made, who the subject matter experts are, and critical information that was previously buried in transactional systems. Social BPM is an ode to self-learning: anew hire's training begins within minutes of joining the organization.

Social BPM's productivity gains are also aided byMobile BPM. Appian's Social BPM feeds are accessible in real-time from all the major mobile platforms (iOS, Android and BlackBerry). Workers can securely connect to their business processes and continue doing business in real-time while away from their desks.

At Appian, we've run our global software business on Social BPM for almost a year now. It's been tremendously beneficial to our employees, and it's use has grown at a pace that has surprised us. An Appian employee, working on any one of the six continents we do business on, is treated to a wealth of targeted information. Heor she can learn from our project go-lives, new customers, upcoming platform functionality, and subject matter experts. Just last week, through Social BPM, I collaborated with our consultants in the United Kingdom,learnt that we added a new customer in Angola, and provided feedback on upcoming platform features. Most of these actions were initiated because a managed-process automatically pushed personalized information to my Social BPM interface.

Social BPM is becoming indispensable to our customers for improving worker productivity, the timeliness of critical information, self-learning and BPM adoption. If you'd like to learn more about Social BPM and Mobile BPM watch our recorded webinar "BPM Just Got Better: Mobile | Cloud | Social"here.

- Sid Nazareth, Director, Solutions Strategy