I’m watching Inception at the moment, truly a great visual feast and bit of a mind-bender. And suddenly I started thinking of Social BPM. If you can remember the scene where Ariadne constructs the mirrored box in Cobbs mind then shatters it, it’s much like Social BPM right now. It’s a dream within a dream (BPM within the Social context) and those constructing that dream have plenty of mirrors to mask the stark reality.
Which is this: Social BPM isn’t taking off as fast as we’d like it to. Why is that ? There’s money being poured into startups right now in social media and social tools but there’s little buy in on the corporate level for Social BPM because BPM itself still isn’t fully understood. There’s another issue too.
Social BPM is still very much seen as a software solution and whilst the movement in this direction seems to follow the parallels of it’s true social kin the methodology and governance hasn’t even started to be looked at, it’s far sexier to play with the software than to think about the supporting methodology. Look at Six Sigma, LEAN, “Outside In”, still looking at the same world 10 years ago whereas now it’s rapidly moving in another direction. Noone seems to be tackling how to adapt BPM the method because they still don’t understand the nature of the social beast itself.
So, the totem is spinning, are you still in the dream or are you looking at reality when you think of Social BPM?