I read an article today from Techcrunch in which Salesforce’s new baby, Do.com, is building out it’s capabilities with new features and open APIs.
Do.com is a task management service built on the Manymoon technology that Salesforce.com acquired last year. Manymoon coined the term “social productivity,” for the platform environment.
At it’s most basic level it’s simply a task management platform. But…..it could also be a first attempt at handling unstructured work and building out a ‘social’ case management tool. While I dislike tagging on ‘social’ to anything related to BPM in a social enterprise context you can begin to understand that knowledge workers who perform loosely coupled tasks which don’t follow rigid workflow patterns could turn to this tool to handle such work, and given the ‘social productivity’ angle and leveraging Salesforce’s own social enterprise platform tools it could extend their capabilities in the Cloud from simply CRM to encroach Case Management territory.
A couple of years ago they bought out a small BPM player called Informavores and built out their visual process manager for Force.com. It’s not a giant leap of imagination to make a connection (assuming that Benioff does himself, he doesn’t like BPM much given it’s hazy history as a workflow integration layer) and see where this could lead.
And if that’s the case (no pun intended) could Salesforce beat the BPMS vendors to having a real social enterprise enabled case tool before BPM does ?
