Abstract
Capitalizing on Web 2.0 to improve communication and knowledge sharing among stakeholders, a new form of business processes (BP), called social business processes (SBP), has emerged. This chapter provides a social business process meta-model called SBP2M that enriches an existing business process meta-model with social aspect. It also proposes a domain-specific language (DSL) for SBP modeling. This DSL is defined based on SBP2M and developed as an extension of the standard BPMN notation. The proposed DSL is simple and yet generic thanks to the reduced number of extensions and its ability to model SBP regardless of the used Web 2.0 technology. To show the applicability of the proposed notation, the authors have implemented it within the BPMN2 modeler editor.
TopBackground
The business process meta-model of Curtis et al. (Curtis, Kellner, & Over, 1992) is the most referenced business process meta-model by the ICT community (Figure 1). It encloses the core business process components classified into four perspectives: functional, organizational, behavioral, and informational. The functional perspective focuses on the tasks in a business process where a task is either an atomic or composite unit of work. The organizational perspective describes the units that participate in the business process execution. The behavioral perspective represents the flows and control nodes linking the tasks of the business process. Finally, the informational perspective describes the entities that a business process produces or manipulates. These entities could be events, information resources, or tangible resources. These four perspectives are commonly modeled using BPMN (OMG, 2011a).
Figure 1. Business process meta-model
TopIn this section, we present the most important works dealing with social business process management systems (BPMS) and those focusing on Social Business Processes.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Social Business Process: It is “a BP that uses any Web 2.0 technology or application to achieve the enterprise business goals and to foster communication, collaboration, and exchange of knowledge either among internal or with external actors in everyday work” ( Yahya et al., 2015 ).
Web 2.0: Constantinides and Fountain define Web 2.0 as “a collection of open-source, interactive, and user-controlled online applications expanding the experiences, knowledge, and market power of the users as participants in business and social processes. Web 2.0 applications support the creation of informal users' networks facilitating the ow of ideas and knowledge by allowing the efficient generation, dissemination, sharing and editing/refining of informational content” ( Constantinides & Fountain, 2008 ).
Social media: Kaplan and Haenlein define social media as “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user generated content.” ( Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010 ).