Social Computing and Governance in an Enterprise Service for Managing Business Processes

The enterprise has historically been ambivalent about Social Computing. Although dynamic communities, collaboration, innovation, and the wisdom of crowds were recognized as valuable, doubts about content quality and standards frequently overshadowed the benefits that Social Computing had already demonstrated outside the enterprise. In this paper, we describe how we have been challenged to add governance to an existing enterprise Wiki designed for capturing, collaborating on, and evolving best practice business process assets. With the addition of governance, our goal has been to transform a best practice process Wiki into an authoritative source for process assets for the enterprise, a repository for registering usage, tracking variations, and linking process assets to one another and to other assets (e.g. accounts) and a vehicle for continual improvement of process assets through annotation, rating, and collaboration. The extensive scope of the content in this project dictates that both the creation and the governance of the content be distributed to the appropriate level of the community. It also requires functions to assist users with leveraging potentially significant amount of user feedback. Overall, the focus of the project has been on maintaining the quality of the content while fostering its continuous improvement and relevance to the community.