Workflow Enactment in a Social Software Environment

Originally conceived with different goals in mind, both Business Process Management (BPM) tools and social software applications help organizations in enacting multi-actor processes. The paradigms they are inspired to are, however, very different and this is mostly true if we focus on how coordination among actors is carried on. In a BPM context, usually, the process that has to be enacted is well defined: a model of the process exists and the interactions among actors are enforced by this model. We refer to this approach as structured coordination. Social software, on the other side, fosters the enactment of processes by putting collaboration tools into the hands of the users. In this case we witness to a significant example of what we call emerging coordination. While a synthesis of the two paradigms is arguably impossible, it is however interesting to study how BPM and social software can benefit from each other. In this paper we show how principles of structured coordination can be injected in a social software environment in order to enact simple workflows. To this end we introduce Social X-Folders, and extension of X-Folders designed to interact with social software tools.