uEngine.org

White paper

ProcessCODI – A SmartWork Platform based on Social Patterns

JaeHoon Lee, Ph.D

uEngineSolutions, Senior research engineer

June/2011

1. Why social pattern?

It is the AGE of Social Network! We see exploding social network articles, conferences, services, and

experts everywhere. As usual, media and newsmakers are forcing companies to have interest in social network.

Will the social network be the final goldmine of business or disappear as another fad?

Before having tools of social network services (SNS), we already have used social network naturally in our

daily life. We make relationships with people, communicate and interact with them, share useful information.

Although modern business processes in companies are specialized and standardized, it is always required to

utilize the resources and information existing outside organizations. Now they are visualized and digitalized by

the social tools, and our interest is how to utilize them in business effectively.

Figure 1 Role of ProcessCODI for smart works

Technically, there are two views on utilizing social networks. One is “How to raise the value of a company

through social networks” and the other is “How to reduce and prevent potential problems from use of social

networks”. Using social networks is undoubtedly promising, but need to be managed at the same time. To

manage them, they should be “discovered”, “visualized”, “standardized”, “defined”, “planned”, and finally

“improved”. Interestingly, these concepts are closed to those of BPM methodology. Moreover, because social

networks are bigger structure than an enterprise, the patterns of social business processes may be much more

complicated. In this article, we call them as “Social Patterns”.

Social patterns make an important role in decision-making when a business unit tries to utilize social

networks. According to the types of social patterns that a company has, their management can either create

values or cause losses. For example, use of social networks for managing customers is a great trend for recent

on-line B2C companies. On the other hands, companies that have severe security policies have to be prudent

when to adopt social networks. In the previous paper, we figured a social pattern named “Smart worker’s

business process”. As shown in Figure 1, business environment consists of the inside of an organization which

has hierarchical structure, formal data and tasks, enterprise systems, and the outside which has horizontal

networks, informal data, and distributed systems.

One of the biggest obstacles of smart works is that these two areas are separated by the firewall of an

organizational boundary. ProcessCodi makes pipelines into this wall so that smart workers can retrieve

information through them. In addition, ProcessCodi controls the issues on the outer flow which is related to

security and the inner flow which is related to information quality or copyright. As a consequence, social

patterns refer to the flow of value in using social networks by companies.

2. How social patterns are created and used

Social patterns are categorized by the target to be mainly utilized by a business unit. They can be human

networks or opened information outside a company. Human networks are used to encourage participation of

domain experts or promote a product or a service to potential customers. Patterns using opened information are

to capitalize open contents as knowledge of a company through mash-ups. Let’s see examples.

Issue tracking through collective intelligence

Figure 2 Issue tracking through collective intelligence

The pattern shown in Figure 2 can be used in an IT service company or a consulting firm. 1) An employee

who encounters a trouble will raise an issue by updating “My status” on a SNS. 2) Experts who have interest in

the topic may respond to it and suggest their opinions. 3) After verification of the suggestions by related

departments, 4) the issue will be finished.

Claim handling process based on SNS

Figure 3 Claim handling process based on SNS

This pattern can be utilized in manufacturing or sales industries. Also, this is one of the improved types of

business process in brand marketing. 1) If a customer complaint in SNS appears, 2) a CS department may detect

and analyze it, and 3) raise an issue to the related departments. 4) These cases are stored in the database, and 5)

the results be notified not only to the customer 6) but also to SNS to prevent similar claims.

Product image analysis

Figure 4 Product image analysis

This pattern is for a company which uses open contents frequently. 1) To analyze the image of a product, 2) a

company searches the related slides from Slideshare, 3) blogs, 4) movie clips from Youtube, 5) and makes a

report by mash-ups to make as an asset of the company.

Document management in open source project

Figure 5 Collaborative document management in open source project

This pattern may be used in a SW company or community based on open source. 1) After starting a project,

the PM group opens the project documents to Wikipedia. 2) These documents may be supplemented by

participants and 3) open content mash-ups. 4)5) When they have matured quality, they will be published

officially by PM groups.

3. How Social BPM implements social patterns

Social patterns span over organizations, users, and systems in wide area, thus they have to be implemented

by integration of SNS, e-mail, knowledge management, BPM. Social BPM is a powerful tool to provide these

integrated functions. Let’s see examples through ProcessCODI - the Social BPM tool.

Integration of SNS and business processes

Figure 6 Integration of SNS and business processes

The basic function of Social BPM is to get external workers involve into the internal business processes. To

do so, the organizational chart of BPM should include information of SNS users. Figure 8 shows a contact list of

ProcessCODI which can include potential users for a task. If you have an expert about your job among

Facebook friends, he/she can be involved into the task. At this time, ProcessCODI can control security problems

by forcing the participants to get steps of approval.

Communication and seamless business processes

Figure 7 Communication and seamless business processes

Business tasks are often to start from a time point when he/she gets an email. ProcessCODI provides an

integrated work list including workitems, emails, chatting, and SNS communication. A business process can be

triggered at the point of taking a workitem. In this point, participants for the process can be added flexibly, and

the whole contents are stored and managed as process instances.

Figure 8 Strategy mind-map and knowledge mash-up

The core knowledge of a company is an enterprise strategy. A mind-map enables smart workers to

implement, understand, and share a strategy. The practical method to connect a strategy to business in

ProcessCODI is to connect processes from a node of a mind-map. Also, key nodes of a mind-map can be

transformed as a strategy map so that they can view in a Navigator, which allows managing knowledge and

processes in an integrated environment.

4. The goal of ProcessCODI: Smartwork

Figure 9 ProcessCODI as a smartwork platform

Social patterns are a way to SMART USE of resources and information in both the inside and outside of an

organization. And ProcessCODI is an integrated approach and tool for smart work. ProcessCODI provides a

smart worker right resources at right time so that he/she can concentrate his/her own value added jobs.

Consequently, ProcessCODI aims at integration of technologies and methodologies, and finally a total platform

for smart works.

About the author JaeHoon Lee, Ph.D

Dr. JH Lee has spent almost five years in the area of BPM in both theory and application. He has the records

of academic research papers for BPM in various industries such as medical, quality engineering, and applied

statistics. Recently, Dr. Lee has been working with uEngine.org, which is one of the world famous open-source

BPM projects.