The rise of social media has led to a major shift in how collaboration and communication happens in many corporate settings. Company intranet systems, blogs, social apps and other technologies have become prominent in countless organizations. As suchsocial functions have progressed, there has been a lot of discussion about making business operations social, something that would be a progression from just having social capabilities introduced in a corporation. According to a recent ZDNet report, business process management software could play a vital role in enabling better social functionality.
Considering the new social landscape
In many cases, new technologies emerge over time and form into groups with complementary solutions to createwhat many experts call technological trinities. The news source explained that the formation of trinities is a fairly common process, and a few such entities are currently in place. Among the most prominent trinities currently in place involves cloud, social and mobile technologies. Moving forward, BPM, social and event solutions have the potential to form a new trinity that enables more meaningful social capabilities.
The report's author recently had a discussion with Appian CEO Matt Calkinswho explained that social apps have become extremely popular in business settings, butare not being executed in a way that creates a sustainable environment for functional growth. There are two key problems - content production models and process integration.
When it comes to content production, social systems often create an environment in which there is an open environment for consuming content, but not much information actually being produced. Unless a lot of information is being brought in from outside of an organization, many social apps quickly run out of steam, as content creation wanes and not enough employees contribute to the solution. The other key problem is that many social apps lead to a lot of discussion, but do not contribute to better processes. This limits the value created by such solutions.
According to the news source, integrating social tools, BPM software and business event management tools can create a new trinity that enables deeper social functionality.
Making the social enterprise a reality
The social enterprise terminology is often thrown around to depict organizations that are truly social, not just using social media systems internally. BPM can make this happen by integrating processes and technology in such a way that collaboration becomes a natural aspect of operations. This allows companies to streamline day-to-day operations and can create a considerable return on investment.
Cindy Cheng
Director of Product Marketing
