Social Process Guidance: Use Crowdsourcing To Drive Better Business Outcomes

Traditional process improvement initiatives often resemble top-down social engineering, in which management identifies re-engineering opportunities, processes undergo changes and automation by technologists, and management pushes new processes onto employees and customers. However, at runtime, businesspeople deal with the myriad process exceptions and nuanced decision points that tidy process models fail to address. Often, the process conversations and evolving work habits surface an inner wisdom that the process modeler may have overlooked — and of which the people involved with the process may initially have been unaware. Social process guidance is an emerging approach that harvests these process conversations to gain greater insight. This approach can drive increased agility and productivity in the age of ubiquitous social networking.