Not even remotely. It is morphing into something we simply expect in our personal lives and use in our professional if and when it is available (hey, when it isn't, we use our personal social media quite often). Benioff recently said that the future of Salesforce is having a chatter front end. That's speaks volumes of the value of collaboration and allowing work, expertise and problem to come together naturally.

Here's a story about last year's Dreamforce, where two social media savvy guys talk of the future.

http://successfulworkplace.com/2012/10/18/social-media-grows-up/

Maybe it has failed in a way some people dreamed of it in combination with BPM. Or actually, modelling process together in a chatty, cloudy tool.

But in daily life (and BPM is just daily business, isn't it?) it just became, as Chris said, more and more common. And do things fail as they become common?

But as some expected to earn some bucks with hyping it in combination with BPM it might sound like a failure. But for all the others, I don't think so. I have to go now, my granny has sent me a tweet that she posted a nice movie on facebook.

I still think it's early days. We still have this disconnect between enterprise social networks (jive, yammer etc) and public social networks that has yet to be resolved. I see alot of untapped opportunities and interesting use cases for using social within a case management context and obviously there will soon be a new generation of employees coming on stream for whom social networking rather than email is the norm.

I don't think social however has any place in a BPMS, the BPMS should integrate to best practice elsewhere.

Is there anything more fundamentally social than business?

I have posted my (basic) view on this on my blog post:
http://flowinglean.blogspot.ro/2013/08/on-real-social-web.html

I think it did. Mostly due to the fact most companies that implemented Social BPM, haven't figured out how to utilize it. The concept was appealing, then the reality happened. I went through dozens of articles on social BPM and found out maybe like 2-3 specific examples/case studies that proved such solution can have positive impact on business.
Besides, isn't Facebook the most counter productive thing ever invented? Thus, isn't implementation of "Facebook for enterprises" doomed?

Maybe in the context of Social + BPM is has failed, but only because the expectations were too high. Perhaps there was the thought that social could suddenly make BPM sexy and get it back onto the CxO agenda. Social is changing the way businesses work - you only have to look at the customer case studies of tibbr, Yammer, Chatter, Jive and others - but it is leaving BPM behind.

BPM needs to morph and find a way to make business leaders realise its value and relevance. I believe that this is by being more specific in terms of how BPM is applied ie satisfying a demand - case management, compliance or customer experience. Simply tacking soical onto BPM was never going to be a winning strategy for either "product"

It is like putting lipstick on a pig

There are plenty of social and collaboration solutions for day to day business: e.g Drupal Commons, Atlassian Confluence, Exo Platform, and many more. They don't really need a "process" to be used, and/or they don't really need to be run through a process. It is the same for social websites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and more. You use them because it is useful to collaborate, share, and "stay tuned".

The question is more: how can you integrate the social tools used by your customers?

You can use tools like Sprout Social, Mention and others to track what people are saying about your company, its products and services on the Internet. Then, you create alerts with some conditions, schedule events and messages, and produce regular reports for top management. Isn't this a business process for communications and marketing ?

An interesting example is General Motors. They use internal social tools, and have business processes. On the communication side, they cut their advertising budget on social networks a few years ago when they realize that when someone "likes" a car, that doesn't mean they will buy it. However, their community managers check that people are happy with the brands, cars, after sales, and issues they talk about on forums and social networks.

Another example is the after sales and support services of Dell. A few years ago, they were a leading PC manufacturer, and they didn't pay enough attention to people complaining on the Internet when their Dell PCs had issues. Their reputation fell and they lost market share. They created a team to browse forums and social networks to answer, help customers to find solutions, and more. It took them a long time to recover a good reputation.

And to finish with a BPMS example, at Bonitasoft, we have a support case management process for demos. Cases can be started by people in the classic ways (email and phone calls) but also via Twitter. This process listens for Twitter mentions and can even geolocalize origins of issues.

When BPM is about being more efficient about customer satisfaction, social is now one of the keys. And whatever are your choices and strategy, this should already be part of your business, be it B2B or B2C. It is possible to manage this without a BPMS because good solutions already exist. But of course, you can take advantage of the flexibility of a BPMS to create custom social processes if what is available doesn't fit your needs.

No! Were just at the beginning. Imagine what new tech like smart-glasses, IoT etc. will do to social business.
Currently we are working with the new ARIS 9 Connect which has a great social BPM functionality for modeling, validation, synchronization and execution. Also other BPM tooling like for example Bonitasoft and Mavim have a big social component. This is the way forward for BPM in terms of process optimization, customer focus and effectiveness. Here you can find the results of a research of e-collaboration which is much in line with social BPM: http://www.elmarvanderheijden.nl/Cloud_Based_eCollaboration_Architecture.pdf

What have failed, utterly, are the bizarre and ultimately valueless concepts of "social BPM" hyped by certain analysts and vendors. If your product's version of "social" consists of employee-contributed comments in the modeling or execution phase... oh dear, you have seriously missed the point.

Social media is about consumers, not internal stakeholders. True social BPM enables you to reach your customers where they live, and gives them the power to engage in your business processes using their social media identities. Anything else isn't "social BPM", but rather a comment field wrapped in a marketing brochure.

As it is rather difficult to win in chess by playing only by queen, Social cannot do all job alone. So, Social should be more social by working together with existing business practices. I think that Social in the way of absorption by established business disciplines. To BPM, Social brings yet another type of coordination technique which I call “community-based” (see the link below) as it helps to obtain the feedback from different internal and external communities

Thanks,
AS

Oh dear, I feel a passionate rant coming on....

I have been involved with a number of social businesses over time, the movement for social enterprise is well understood, and serves communities around the globe very well indeed. It is refreshing to be associated with enterprises whose goals are not profit motivated, but instead on job creation and giving back to the communities they serve. Many involved got very upset when the term social enterprise or social business started being "abused" as they see it. In fact some work on social collaboration by MWD Advisors found that the term was well established before the technology community tried to leverage it, and several technology players have backed of under pressure from social enterprise leaders.

Now, back to what the question might have meant, social in the context of BPM and the general business world has not failed them, instead they have failed social! Social media and the platforms on which they operate rely on choice, contribute when you want, what you want. They have intuitive interfaces that work across many platforms and we can chose on which ones we wish to engage. Companies putting in social as "the" way to collaborate and assigning badges is not leveraging social. So I agree we are at the beginning and have yet to see how social will really play out in business.

One thing I am sure about is that by policing it to business only topics and the word police monitoring what and how we say things, we are not making it attractive to use.

No of this is too suggest that there are not some great technical solutions, which greatly aid collaboration and provide value. But to my mind that value cannot yet be thought of as social, which is perhaps another reason it is not getting traction with management.

As ever over hyped and I suspect poor delivery on expectations. I see BPM not just supporting the handling the formal but also the informal. In particular I would see "value networks" that cross the silo boundaries and which can produce tangible benefits that assist with better decision making by senior management. As such will raise BPM's profile in these informal arenas?

With the right BPM tools processes are built direct with users and our experience suggests that it brings teams together not just collaborating in work but also exploring new ways to just do things better. It never crosses their mind it is “social”; maybe it is just undoing the barriers that old “IT” such as ERP has created?

Social BPM is just beginning. The business world is evidently still two steps behind the non-business world in this respect. But just as I see gradual increased use of Social Tools in business outside BPM (e.g. Yammer), we are also beginning to see increased social operations inside BPM. Our own Social BPM features, including Questions & Answers and Comments on processes, are fast becoming sought-out functionality. Now we provide such features out of the box, and its due to popular demand of our clients. What does the future hold? We expect to see further socialization of BPM processes, across company boundaries. It's more about collaboration and sharing information than just being friendly. Social activity around process management actually brings better results, because people aren't working in their own little worlds anymore.

Social is dead, long live Social!

This thread and Peter's Question of the Day meme are evidence of the power of social to draw people to discuss/resolve problems. Of course, this is disconnected Social, the question is really how do we integrate Social into 'work' so to improve quality of the work and the relationships that sustain it.

From points above, incremental improvements of conventional process technologies haven't delivered, which could have been expected. As Lloyd George said "you can't cross a chasm in two small steps".

I'm fairly confident that change will not come from the 'usual suspects', but as with most innovation, it will come from the frontier and when it arrives it will be intuitive, interoperable and disruptive (that will be the test of it).