Social networking is more and more considered as crucial for helping organizations harness the value of informal relationships and weak ties, without compromising the consolidated business practices embedded in conventional BPM solutions. However, no appropriate notation has been devised for specifying social aspects within business process models. In this paper we propose a first attempt towards the extension of business process notations with social features. In particular, we devise an extension of the BPMN notation for capturing social requirements. Such extension does not alter the semantics of the language: it includes a set of new event types and task types, together with some annotation for the pool/lane levels. This notation enables the description of social behaviours within BPMN diagrams. To demonstrate the applicability of the notation, we implement it within the WebRatio BPM editor and we provide a code generation framework that automatically produces a process enactment Web application connected with mainstream social platforms. This speech was given at the 3rd International Workshop on BPMN in Luzern, Switzerland.

1. A Notation for supporting
Social Business Process Modeling
Marco Brambilla, Piero Fraternali, Carmen Vaca
Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione, Politecnico di Milano
Contact:
marco.brambilla@polimi.it
marcobrambi
marcobrambi
Brambilla, Fraternali, Vaca: A notation for Social BPM BPMN Workshop, Luzern, November 21, 2011
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2. Outline
• The goals of social BPM
• A BPMN-based notation for social BPM
• An approach for fast prototyping
• Conclusions
Brambilla, Fraternali, Vaca: A notation for Social BPM 2

3. Social BPM: The idea
Integrating social network tools and practices
with BPM for improving effectiveness
and efficiency of business processes
 Social for BP design and improvement
 Integration of social networks in BPM-based interfaces
 Collecting feedback
 Analysing streams
 Social for BP participation and implementation
 Integration of social networks in
BPM-based interfaces
 Some tasks implemented through
social interaction instead of
traditional applications
– Social assignment of responsibility
– Escalation
– Task execution
– Destructured processes (vs. email)
Brambilla, Fraternali, Vaca: A notation for Social BPM 3

4. Social networks and tools
It’s not just about
 Twitter
and
 Facebook
 Tens of categories
 Hundreds of solutions
 Different purposes
Source: http://www.theconversationprism.com/
Brambilla, Fraternali, Vaca: A notation for Social BPM 4

5. The contribution of “social” to the BPM lifecycle
 Weak Ties / Tacit Knowledge exploitation (e.g., team formation)
 Knowledge sharing (e.g., self-service technical support)
 Social Feedback (e.g., quality of service monitoring)
 Transparency: (e.g., legislation building)
 Participation: (e.g., participatory budgeting)
 Activity distribution (e.g., crowd-sourced work)
Social BPMN
 Decision distribution (e.g., social CRM) Socialization
design
Design patterns
Socialization
goals
Optimize Model
Model
transformation
Monitor Deploy
Social BPM
Participatory & Execute architecture
social enactment
Brambilla, Fraternali, Vaca: A notation for Social BPM 5

6. The Social BPM Space
A continuum from closed to open social BPM, where
each organization can find the mix of control &
flexibility it needs
Process model decided top-down and hard wired,
Closed BPM task assignment rigid, communication limited
to task input-output
Process model resulting from merge of different
Participatory design models (e.g., merger&acquisition), task/flow variants
Actors are fixed, but can communicate with social
Participatory enactment tools (e.g., follow up a task, tweet on a task status, etc)
The community of actors can be (in part) open: e.g.,
Social enactment launch a task to be executed in Facebook,
find an expert in LinkedIn, vote for alternative flows
Process constraints are mined and progressively
Process mining enforced by observing community behaviors
Source: http://www.modeldrivenstar.org/
Brambilla, Fraternali, Vaca: A notation for Social BPM 6

7. BPMN Extension: Formalization
Exploiting the extension mechanism of BPMN 2.0.
Brambilla, Fraternali, Vaca: A notation for Social BPM 7

8. SocialExtension
SocialExtension
1 1 1 1
SocialMonitoring SocialBehavior SocialContent SocialAccess
1 1 1
SocialTaskType SocialTaskType SocialPlatform
ReceiveSocialContent ReceiveSocialEvent Publish Comment Vote Rank Invite URI
Brambilla, Fraternali, Vaca: A notation for Social BPM 8

9. Social ExtensionDefinitions
We introduce the SocialExtension extension.
Four main extension definitions are included:
• SocialMonitoring, addressing capturing of the social events
within the enterprise platform;
• SocialBehavior, describing the possible social interaction
activities;
• SocialContent, specifying information which is shared or
produced in a social way;
• SocialAccess, desribing the social platform properties,
including the access management options.
Brambilla, Fraternali, Vaca: A notation for Social BPM 9

10. Social Lane
Metamodel: BaseElement
-Id : String
1
Lane
-name : String
SocialLane SocialAccess
1
Notation:
Brambilla, Fraternali, Vaca: A notation for Social BPM 10

11. Social Behaviour and Monitoring
Activity
Metamodel:
SubProcess Task CallActivity
ReceiveTask
SendTask
-implementation : String
-implementation : String
-instatiate : Boolean
SocialBehavior SocialMonitoring
-description : String -description : String
Message
-name : String
Operation
-name : String
-implementationRef :Element
Brambilla, Fraternali, Vaca: A notation for Social BPM 11

12. Publish task – different scopes
Notation:
Audience scope Visual description Icon
Broadcast White envelope with a thick
arrow pointing to the social
network audience Invite to vote
on the poll
Multicast White envelope with 3 small
arrows pointing to the social
network audience
Invite to vote
on the poll
Unicast White envelope with a one
single arrow pointing to the
social network audience Invite to vote
on the poll
Brambilla, Fraternali, Vaca: A notation for Social BPM 12

13. Attribute value Icon
Comment Comment
Vote Vote
Invite + Invite
Rank Rank
Brambilla, Fraternali, Vaca: A notation for Social BPM 13

14. A simple example
Social generation of metrics for quality assessment of
government offices (PA sector)
Public Metrics
Local government office
Supervisor
Calculate
Identify Collect and
Evaluate weighted
public review votes and
all metrics evaluation Publish
metrics Publish metrics comments result evaluation
to citizens result
Social Network
Citizens
Vote on public
metrics Comment
Brambilla, Fraternali, Vaca: A notation for Social BPM 14

15. Social BPM design patterns
As in the tradition of BPM design patterns, they capture
reusable solutions to recurrent socialization requirements:
• Dynamic enrollment
• Poll
• People / Skill search
• Social content publication
• Social sourcing (vs. crowdsourcing)
• Advancement notification
• Ranking and commenting
Brambilla, Fraternali, Vaca: A notation for Social BPM 15

16. Design patterns and goals
• Socialization goals can be used as drivers for the selection of
the social BPM design patterns that are more relevant to a
process socialization effort
Brambilla, Fraternali, Vaca: A notation for Social BPM 16

17. A Method for Social BPM based on MDD
Model-driven approach to Process and software application models.
Social aspects are considered at the various levels and transformed to running code.
Social Process Model Social Application Model
Vote
Invite
It is used to define:
It is used to define: •Exchange of user profiles from/to SN
•Social actors (e.g., Community Pools) •Social data (e.g., shared content)
•Social Activities (twittering, voting, following..) •Interface and components for social tasks (e.g.,
•Social events twittering, voting, tagging, following)
Based on BPMN social design patterns Based on WebML social components
Brambilla, Fraternali, Vaca: A notation for Social BPM 17

18. BPM4people Research Project
• EU Funded Project, 2 years www.bpm4people.org
• 4 SMEs + 2 Universities
• Main deliverables
• Methodology
• Modeling languages
• Reusable design patters
• Forward engineering architecture
• Cases, cases, cases…
Brambilla, Fraternali, Vaca: A notation for Social BPM 18

19. DEMO
http://www.bpm4people.org/cms/content/en/demos
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qNV1Iw1oiA
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20. Ongoing and future work
Ongoing work: reality check Future work
• EU Parliament: IT • Complete the
requirement elicitation implementation of model
processes opened to all DGs editor, model transformation,
social WebML components
• NGO: consumers’ claim
management and class action • Investigate SNA techniques
organization for social task optimization
• PA: participative territory • Define social process
planning improvement metrics and
Social Activity Monitoring
• Multinational company: concepts
social CRM
Brambilla, Fraternali, Vaca: A notation for Social BPM 20

21. Thanks.
Questions?
Contact:
Marco Brambilla
marco.brambilla@polimi.it
marcobrambi
marcobrambi
Brambilla, Fraternali, Vaca: A notation for Social BPM 21