Who is to Blame for Social BPM?

By brian | January 24, 2012 | Social Applications

Of course, this is a tongue-in-cheek question.  Nonetheless, there is a lot of pressure on the BPM industry right now to jump on the “Social” bandwagon and this begs the question of whether or not this is a good idea?  What is really at the root of the “social” juggernaut?

It seems clear to me that the root of the change is the Generation Y, and the way this generation has changed technology and expectations around the usage of technology.  Generation Y has set new expectations of how technology should work and more importantly how it should work for the individual (remember Egypt?).  In my opinion, it is the combination of the advance of technology and the way this new generation interacts with technology that has caused a number of related trends starting with the massive growth of  the long tail (as popularized by Chris Anderson in Wired in 2004), then creating Wiki-mania, the explosion of mobile apps, and finally the rise of everything social.  Gen Y is the first generation to experience the Internet and mobile technology as far back as they can remember.   As such Gen Y has an intrinsic belief that technology exists to help them build their personal, highly individualized world.  This was not the case previously.  The first computers were certainly anything but personal and the first personal computers were anything but powerful compared to today’s Internet and mobile technologies.

The long tail was really the first manifestation of the coming age of “social”.  The long tail is the statistical property that a larger share of population rests within the tail of a probability distribution than observed under a ‘normal’ or Gaussian distribution (Wikipedia).   This concept was popularized in 2004 by Chris Anderson and described strategies related to selling large number of unique items with relatively small quantities sold of each.  The concept can be applied to the distribution of just about anything that can leverage communications technology.   This strategy wasn’t possible 15 years ago because technology didn’t make it feasible.  When there were only 10 TV channels, you simply couldn’t afford to rent a channel to produce a program that would interest 10 thousand viewers.  Instead, if you wanted to produce a program, it had to interest 10 million viewers.

The wiki and the self-publishing explosion were part of the same trend.  I can write this blog because it is now feasible to be interesting to a few hundred or a few thousand readers instead of tens of thousands or millions of readers.  If I had to take my thoughts to a publishing house, I would never get past the lobby!  In this brave new world, Newsweek goes bankrupt and Leo LaPorte thrives.

The mobile app represented the leap of this phenomenon from the desktop and onto the mobile device, i.e. the merger of long tail and the mobile phone.   Think about it for a moment.  Nobody buys an app that does “everything.”  The app is the ultimate in easily digestible bits and bytes.  It is meant to do one thing and do it really well, fast, and cheap.  The long tail just got longer thanks to the iphone.

“Social” is the ultimate combination of all of the above.  It is the long tail, fertilized by mobile and taken to the extreme.  It is about personal production and personal consumption just like blogs and wikis.  When, where, and how are dictated by the individual consumer/producer (the line is intentionally blurred).  “Social” is Gen Y at its best, realizing that technology is here for us as individuals.  The interests of the “larger group” are now nothing more than trends that appear, disappear, and reappear according to the will and interests of individuals and never dictated by totalitarian governments, media conglomerates, or massive profit hungry corporations.

So, now what happens when you take a concept clearly defined and created by a young, ultra-mobile, and ultra-individualistic group such as Gen Y,  and you apply it to the ultimate expression of enterprise (i.e. corporate) software?  Can they fit together?    After all, Social is the ultimate expression of Gen Y taking technology and molding it to its own wants and needs.  BPM is exactly the opposite.  BPM is about making people fit into a predefined world of process.

So what is Social BPM?  Is it a last ditched effort by a highly threatened discipline to appeal to those that will soon be in the position to make this technology obsolete?  Some of you readers may remember the 1989 death gasp of Oldsmobile which featured the idea that “this is not your father’s Oldsmobile?”  Seems to me that battle cry of Social BPM feels a little the same way.

Maybe this sounds excessive considering how well the industry is doing and how well all of the BPM companies seem to be doing (our company doubled revenues from 2010 to 2011!).  But is it possible that BPM is growing from inertia and not so much because it is really the technology that is best positioned for the future?  After all, how many of you readers keep buying CRM accounts with your CRM provider, not because you like your provider or think your provider is cutting edge but because it is simply too difficult to change.

Keith Swenson says that Social BPM really needs to be a Quantum Leap.  Exactly.  In other words, Social BPM needs to become something that BPM is not.  It is like saying that email needs to become twitter or skype if it wants to survive into the next decade.  The point is that it is not…and that is why it will die and it will get replaced by something different.

In some senses BPM software is industrial age by nature.  It is all about enterprises wanting to control individuals.  There is very little room for freedom and self-expression.  BPM is about making sure your process is executed the same way every time.   Sounds a bit draconian, right?  Well, the fact is that it works and can work well…in the enterprise.  Enterprises are in fact draconian and dull by nature.  How else can you produce millions of widgets and make sure they all look identical?

Ok, I exaggerate.  However, my point is that not everything social can or should be applied to BPM.  BPM is extremely useful in many contexts and probably always will be.  But collaboration and social – these concepts are sexy.     If BPM wants to become truly social, it will have to become something it is not.  And in doing so, it will probably no longer be BPM software.