The way businesses function is gradually shifting. With the rise of emerging technologies, such as the cloud, organizations are experiencing major technological changes. As technological advances alter the corporate world, many companies are also experiencing a shift in how they develop their information-gathering processes. Social media is at the center of this change.
According to a recent report from the Harvard Business Review, many businesses are beginning to use social media to gather data about global market conditions more quickly and make operational decisions accordingly. Within this climate, the pace at which organizations can take social data and use it to improve processes provides a vital competitive edge. As a result, using social media in line with business process management is becoming more popular.
Aligning BPM and social media
The news source explained that social media gives businesses a unique opportunity to improve their lines of communication. Within this goal, social media provides a streamlined method of gathering information from a wide range of sources and getting into the business pipeline. This allows the social data to inform BPM efforts within an organization, creating an environment in which operations are more responsive.
The role of BPM software
BPM software can play a key role in this broad trend of using social data to inform processes. While using social data to improve operations sounds nice, actually doing it can be particularly challenging, especially for organizations with complex application architectures that depend heavily on diverse databases. In such settings, social data has to get through the data mining application, into various databases, through the storage network, to application servers and from there to end users who may be running an application through the cloud and on a mobile device.
For social data to be useful, it has to be accessible to users in any web-connected location, regardless of which device they are using. For the most part, IT systems lack the flexibility and intelligence needed to provide this type of functionality. This is where BPM solutions step in to ensure IT functionality mirrors what businesses want to achieve from a BPM strategy perspective. Through application integration and process automation, BPM software makes the IT infrastructure more social, enabling end users to get the information they need quickly and easily.
Cindy Cheng
Director of Product Marketing
