Blending BPMS with social software for knowledge-intense work: Research issues

Abstract

Knowledge-intense processes are by their very nature exploratory, non-repetitive in detail and not completely known in advance. Flexibility, effective knowledge management and efficient collaboration are important requirements of such processes. A typical flow-oriented BPMS, relying on the generation of a model a priori and imposing a specific sequence of tasks to process participants is not appropriate for such processes, as it does not align with their nature and cannot satisfy their requirements. Therefore, alternative approaches are explored by the research community. An emerging trend towards this direction is the incorporation of social software features in BPMS. However, bringing the BPMS and social software together is not a straightforward task in the context of knowledge-intense work. Several crucial issues arise that should be closely investigated for an appropriate approach to be developed ensuring an efficient execution of knowledge-intense processes. In this paper, a number of such issues are identified helping towards the detection of an effective and efficient solution when blending features from both software types. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.