The concept of the social enterprise has been gaining popularity recently, as more organizations look at social media as a model for how they can improve internal operations and engage customers. Social media connects users to one another based on a defined set of variables, at least when everything works properly. This allows individuals to maintain contact with friends, family members and colleagues casually, making it easier to stay in touch about important issues.
When applied to business, social operations is about more than just putting some social tools into applications and services. Instead, it is about making actual operations social. This is accomplished by taking the intuitive and often automated communication and collaboration capabilities of the broad social media landscape and applying them to business processes. Social business process management solutions can make this possible.
Creating a social enterprise
Social BPM solutions provide the foundation that companies need to make their actual operations social. The key to achieving the goal of the social enterprise is to develop clear, intuitive and automated ways to pass operations between userswhenever possible. For example, when a worker in the warehouse should be able to notice a supply issue and makean order, that order should be passed directly to accounting without any input from the warehouse worker. This saves the warehouse employee from having to send an email or communicate in another traditional way, applying the intuitive capabilities of social media to company operations. If the supply issue is dire enough that deliveries may be delayed or sales of a certain product should be halted, a good BPM solution will automate the necessary messaging to those departments so the warehouse worker only has to complete a single process to start a chain of automated processes that inform operations.
Automation and social operations
Process automation is a vital component of the social enterprise. Automating repeatable processes allows projects to be passed from one user to another without personal input. This is integral to the broad social functionality needed to streamline operations. As a result, organizations striving to create a social business climate can benefit substantially from a BPM software solutioncapable of handling a high volume of automated tasks without experiencing performance issues.
Cindy Cheng
Director of Product Marketing
