As I stated in my previous post (Complex Adaptive System and the “please adjust” culture of India), I am getting back to my first love, BPM, as part of the bigger picture view I want to take on how ‘social’ is going to affect businesses. No, am not abandoning Social CRM, just trying to figure out an integrated approach that would include BPM, Learning & Innovation. CRM is just one of the many business processes in an organization, and thus, I look at CRM as a subset of BPM. However, that is not what the market believes in I guess. [Update: I am considering CRM as a subset of BPM solely from a business processes perspective, as in, when a BPM consultant would model the processes. CRM is a business strategy, since customers are core to the business, and building & maintaining relationship with them is paramount to the existence of the business.]
As far as personal experience goes, BPM for me started out as a set of either workflow automation tools or middleware tools and merged sometime back. And then as an afterthought lessons from BPR where incorporated and BPMN was created to keep everybody happy. But thats just my understanding of the way things developed and am bound to get hit on that take. 🙂 (I was not into reading analyst reports or attending conferences back then, definitely not into blogs.) So, to keep things on a safer ground, in this post I will just consider how the use of social technologies are going to affect the way business processes are handled.
Collaboration
The main theme emerging out of the noise of social computing in business terms is collaboration – within, outside & across the organizational boundaries. And this when collaboration is in reality a fundamental biological behaviour which takes place anywhere humans work together. Collaboration cannot happen in the absence of communication, but the only means of communication available in an enterprise are private channels. Even emails, though can happen among a group of people, is not public. Nobody outside the group is free to view the email, let alone participate in the conversation. If help is needed from someone outside the existing group, they need to be included by the existing members. Collaboration under such circumstances becomes all about social negotiation and not about the creative output.
What social technologies offer is a way to communicate in public, attracting people who might be of help or value, allow people to discover newer things they might not have known. And since they are transparent and in the open, it lends to increased trust among the members and thus a tighter group thats goes out of the way to help each other.
Thankfully thought leaders in collaborative/social BPM have been considering the impact of the above aspect both for process modelling as well as execution.
Emergence
The other theme emerging is that of emergence itself. Though it is not of surprise to those who are innovative or creative, it certainly is a big deal for the traditional command & control style businesses entrenched in the “push” market/economy. Luck & serendipity are two other closely related aspects to that of emergence. As opposed to determining what the outcomes will be everytime, we need to let things emerge out of the seeming anarchy/chaos that is social media. In business context, employees already follow certain rules & regulations of the company as well as have a certain organizational culture and individual work habits. By letting employees communicate & collaborate with each other across departmental/functional/informational/other silos we are not only letting serendipity to happen but by allowing them to share & build upon/use knowledge & ideas of other employees, are also letting solutions & innovations emerge.
But today’s enterprise systems do not allow serendipity to happen emergence in business, if any, is outside the system. ERP, CRM, BPM, HRM, etc. are all modeled top down and allow for only certain information to be processed, a work to be done. Communication, if any, in these systems are limited to that which is obligated by regulation/process. There is no scope for new patterns to emerge since every outcome is predetermined. That which is not, is an exception. Ask an average BPM consultant and chances are that she/he will prattle that the increasing number of new situations we infrequently face in the fast changing world it is today are an exception and needs to be handled as such by the system. Number of times a situation is faced may be too few to warrant for incorporating it into the system, but number of such situations is increasing. Kind of a long tail of business processes in the enterprise.
Biomimicry
Wikipedia defines Biomimicry or biomimetics as:
“examination of nature, its models, systems, processes, and elements to emulate or take inspiration from in order to solve human problems.”
I have been interested in Biology since very young. Though I did not like the prospect of having to read for so many years to become a doctor & thus gave that profession a pass, Biology has always been a close second to my love for computers. And no wonder that I look for inspiration from it when I have to think through the various aspects of leveraging social computing in a business context. Thankfully I am not alone in this and am discovering more people as with each day I spend looking for inspiration from nature.
A living system is defined as a network of processes that simultaneously produce and realize that same network as a unity.
I consider a parallel between living systems and a group of people collaborating/working together. The above definition hopefully provides you insights into why I consider biology for inspiration wrt social computing in general. And in particular, where it comes to business innovation, I can’t help considering about the brain.
Synapses
In neurology, a synapse is a junction that permits a neuron to pass an electrical or chemical signal to another cell. An electrical synapse is between two neurons & has been associated with memory storage in the cerebellum. A chemical synapse is between a neuron & a non-neuronal cell, like those in a muscle or glands and thus producing a direct action (muscle) or a directive (hormones from glands). As this MIT Technology Review article states about a research on Memristors by HP labs:
One of the defining features of the connections between neurons is that they become stronger when neurons fire together; hence the phrase “neurons that fire together, wire together”, a phenomenon otherwise known as Hebbian learning. Various experiments have shown that this effect is most pronounced early in the learning process, when the increase in connection strength is greatest. Later learning merely reinforces the links.
And this is exactly why I have chosen the word Synapse to name a framework I & my team (they are right now being convinced to get a complete buy-in) are trying to come up with for leveraging social technologies for business.
Synapses 2.0, as I call it, aims at bringing value to the business in terms of addressing
- collaboration in the user tasks as part of various business processes (Social CRM/ERP/BPM, etc.),
- learning inherent in the system/platform (Social Learning) in conjunction with the corporate training goals & systems and
- finally the epitome of connected individuals – innovation – both democratized sourcing/filtering/execution as well as beuracratic sponsoring.
Thank your for writing such a nice article. After reading your article, we
have tried to evaluate a few social business software such as the Akeni Social
Network software and have found to be very useful in a corporate environment.
I have been to a few companies and most of them are still using IM as their
internal communication platform.