From a Social Wiki to a Social Workflow System – a literature review

From a Social Wiki to a Social Workflow System

Gustaf Neumann, Selim Erol. Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, Vienna Austria
{Gustaf.Neumann, Selim.Erol}@wu-wien.ac.at

Summary

Neumann and Erol (2009) present their approach for using wiki applications to develop a collaborative open-source work-flow system. The Authors believe that recent developments of social software are an extension of existing collaborative applications currently inplace, designed to support unstructured communication and knowledge/information sharing.

According to Neumann and Erol (2009), the demand for social technologies such as blogs/wikis/IM/document sharing etc is evidenced by the introduction of these social components into leading business software applications. The Authors assert the intent is to provide for ease of use/networking/communication/sharing, accessibility & visibility amongst other drivers.

As a driver for the adoption of social technology to BPM, Neumann and Erol (2009) discuss how recent research indicates the need for improved flexibility within the business process management approach. Their research has highlighted “a shift from top down approaches in business process design and deployment to an approach where also bottom-up reengineering and adaption from the user side is welcomed”. This requirement for agility is an outcome of a rapidly changing business environment and the need to quickly adapt to process and Organisational changes.

In this paper, a key finding reached by the Authors on the difference between wikis and traditional workflow systems is that the usefulness of the former is based on the wisdom of the crowds (user community) rather than pre-defined workflow knowledge. The concluding section of this paper goes on to describe the implementation of a wiki based workflow system.