A Social Software-Based Coordination Platform. Tool Paper

Organizational best practices are unstructured, emergent processes that freely coordinate actors engaged in reaching organizations' goals. In recent years we are witnessing the wide adoption of social software (blogs, microblogs, wiki, forums, shared calendars, etc.) as primary technological tools to support organizational best practices, fostering their creation, evolution and sharing, allowing their continuous refinement and alignment with the organization's mission and evolving know-how. While organizational best practices and social software tools are good candidates to support specific processes within the organization (and among organizations) they also present several issues, when compared to classic BPM tools - those based on structured coordination and well-defined process models: since they have no explicit representation it is hard to analyze them (by analytic techniques or by simulation), to monitor their evolution and to support their execution; moreover it is hard to extract explicit knowledge from them. In this paper we present a set of tools that complement social software in creating a real coordination platform, mitigating some of the aforementioned issues.