The 5th Workshop on Business Process Management

and Social Software (BPMS2’12)

3 September, Tallinn Estonia

Deadline for workshop paper submissions: 1 June 2012

Social software [1] is a new paradigm that is spreading quickly in society, organizations and economics. Social software has created a multitude of success stories such as wikipedia.org and the development of the Linux operating system. Therefore, more and more enterprises regard social software as a means for further improvement of their business processes and business models. For example, they integrate their customers into product development by using blogs to capture ideas for new products and features. Thus, business processes have to be adapted to new communication patterns between customers and the enterprise: for example, the communication with the customer is increasingly a bi-directional communication with the customer and among the customers. Social software also offers new possibilities to enhance business processes by improving the exchange of knowledge and information, to speed up decisions, etc. Social software is based on four principles: weak ties, social production, egalitarianism and mutual service provisioning.

• Weak ties [2]
  

Weak-ties  are spontaneously established contacts between individuals that create new views and allow combining competencies. Social software supports the creation of weak ties by supporting to create contacts in impulse between non-predetermined individuals

• Social Production [3], [4]
  

Social Production  is the creation of artefacts, by combining the input from independent contributors without predetermining the way to do this. By this means it is possible to integrate new and innovative contributions not identified or planned in advance. Social mechanisms such as reputation assure quality in social production in an a posteriori approach by enabling a collective evaluation by all participants.

• Egalitarianism [4]

Egalitarianism is the attitude of handling individuals equally. Social software highly relies on egalitarianism and therefore strives for giving all participants the same rights to contribute. This is done with the intention to encourage a maximum of contributors and to get the best solution fusioning a high number of contributions, thus enabling the wisdom of the crowds . Social software realizes egalitarianism by abolishing hierarchical structures, merging the roles of contributors and consumers and introducing a culture of trust.

• Mutual Service Provisioning [5]
  

Social software abolishes the separation of service provider and consumer by introducing the idea, that service provisioning is a mutual process of service exchange. Thus both service provider and consumer (or better prosumer) provide services to one another in order co-create value . This mutual service provisioning contrasts to the idea of industrial service provisioning, where services are produced in separation from the customer to achieve scaling effects.

Objective

Up to now, the interaction of social software and its underlying paradigms with business processes have not been investigated in depth. Therefore, the objective of the workshop is to explore how social software interacts with business process management, how business process management has to change to comply with weak ties, social production, egalitarianism and mutual service, and how business processes may profit from these principles.

Goal

Based on the successful BPMS2’08, BPMS2’09, BPMS’10, BPMS’11 workshops, the goal of the BPMS2’12 workshop is to promote the integration of business process management with social software and to enlarge the community pursuing the theme.

Publications

The common effort of workshop participants created two papers: 

Agenda (to be announced)

Workshop Topics

The workshop will discuss three topics:

1. New opportunities provided by social software for BPM

- How can business processes fit to business models based on the paradigm of social production?

- Which new possibilities for the design of business processes are created by social software?

- How are trust and reputation established in business processes using social software?

- Are there business processes which require sociality, especially when they are not well defined (as production workflows) but collaborative or ad hoc?

- How do weak ties, social production, egalitarianism and mutual service provisioning influence the design of business processes?

- What is the impact on conceptual models for those categories of business processes which are not well-defined or that we do not wish to freeze using classical business process enactment systems for instance?

2. Engineering next generation of business processes: BPM 2.0 ?

- Do we need new BPM methods and/or paradigms to cope with social software?

- Is there an influence of weak ties, social production, egalitarianism and mutual service provisioning on BPM methods themselves?

- Are there any similarities or relationships with process mining techniques and also with workflow control and role patterns?

- Which phases of the BPM lifecycle (Design, Deployment, Performance, and Evaluation) are affected the most by social software?

- How can BPM profit from using social software?

- Which types of social software can be used in which phases of the BPM lifecycle?

3. Business process implementation support by social software

- Which kinds of social software can be used to implement business processes?

- Which categories of business processes can profit from social software?

- How does social software interact with WFMS or other business process support systems?

- How can we use Wikis, Blogs etc. to support business processes?

- What new kinds of business knowledge representation are offered by social production?

Prospective authors are invited to submit papers for presentation in any of the areas listed above. Only papers in English will be accepted. Length of full papers must not exceed 12 pages (There is no possibility to buy additional pages). Position papers and tool reports should be no longer than 6 pages. Papers should be submitted in the new LNBIP format ( http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-7-487211-0 ). Papers have to present original research contributions not concurrently submitted elsewhere. The title page must contain a short abstract, a classification of the topics covered, preferably using the list of topics above, and an indication of the submission category (regular paper/position paper/tool report).

Please use Easychair for submitting your paper: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=bpms211

The paper selection will be based upon the relevance of a paper to the main topics, as well as upon its quality and potential to generate relevant discussion. All the workshop papers will be published by Springer as a post-proceeding volume (to be sent around 4 months after the workshop) in their Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing (LNBIP) series.

Activities

Important Dates

Workshop Organization 

The Workshop organizers are:

Selmin Nurcan	Rainer Schmidt
University Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne	Aalen University
France	Anton-Huber-Str. 25 73430 Aalen Germany
Phone: +33 - 1 44 07 86 34	Phone: +49 (0) 7361 576 - 4241
Fax: +33 - 1 44 07 89 54	Fax: + 49 (0) 7361 576 - 4316
nurcan@univ-paris1.fr	Rainer.Schmidt@htw-aalen.de

Workshop Organization

The members of the program committee are: