JOURNAL OF SOFTWARE MAINTENANCE AND EVOLUTION: RESEARCH AND PRACTICE incorporating SOFTWARE PROCESS: IMPROVEMENT AND PRACTICE J. Softw. Maint. Evol.: Res. Pract. 2011; 23:297–326 Published online 22 February 2011 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/smr.523 Key challenges for enabling agile BPM with social software Giorgio Bruno 1 , Frank Dengler 2 , Ben Jennings 3 , Rania Khalaf 4 , Selmin Nurcan 5,10 , Michael Prilla 6 , Marcello Sarini 7 , Rainer Schmidt 8, ∗, † and Rito Silva 9 1 Dip. Automatica e Informatica, Politecnico di Torino, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Torino, Italy 2 Institut AIFB, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, KIT-Campus S¨ ud Geb. 11.40 76128 Karlsruhe, Germany 3 University College London, 44 Hartswood Avenue, Reigate, Surrey, U.K. 4 IBM TJ Watson Research Center, 1 Rogers St, Cambridge, MA 02142, U.S.A. 5 University Paris, 1 Panth´ eon, Sorbonne, Paris, France 6 University of Bochum, Institute for Applied Work Science, Chair of Information and Technology Management, Universitaetsstr. 150, 44780 Bochum, Germany 7 Department of Psychology—University of Milano-Bicocca, Piazza Ateneo Nuovo, 1, Milano, Italy 8 Aalen University, Anton-Huber-Str. 25, 73430 Aalen, Germany 9 INESC-ID/IST/Technical University of Lisbon, Rua Alves Redol 9, 1000-029 Lisboa, Portugal 10 IAE de Paris—Sorbonne Graduate Business School, 21, rue Broca, 75005 Paris, France SUMMARY Business Process Management is called agile when it is able to react quickly and adequately to internal and external events. Agile Business Process Management requires putting the life cycle of business processes on a new paradigm. It is advocated in this paper that social software allows us to satisfy the key requirements for enabling agile BPM by applying the four features of social software: weak ties, social production, egalitarianism and mutual service provision. Organizational and semantic integration and responsiveness (of the business processes engineering, execution and management activities) have been identified as the main requirements for implementing an agile BPM life cycle. Social software may be used in the BPM life cycle in several manners and using numerous approaches. This paper presents seven among them and then analyzes the ‘support’ effects between those approaches and the underlying social software features, and the three requirements for Agile BPM. Copyright 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Received 24 February 2010; Revised 14 November 2010; Accepted 16 November 2010 KEY WORDS: social software; Business Process Management; agile BPM 1. INTRODUCTION Today, there is a growing awareness of the shortcomings of classical BPM approaches. Based on observations made in practice, issues like the model-reality divide [1] have been identified. It describes the divide between abstract process models and the processes executed in practice. The recent work has revealed a number of viewpoints or perspectives that have exerted great influence on the design of notations and languages for business processes. These viewpoints propose different ways of organizing the basic constituents of cooperative business environments, which are operational business activities, coordination activities and the common field of work [2]. Operational activities are units of work meant to produce some changes in the underlying common field of work which is a repository of artifacts (business data and documents). Coordination ∗ Correspondence to: Rainer Schmidt, Aalen University, Anton-Huber-Str. 25, 73430 Aalen, Germany. † E-mail: Rainer.Schmidt@htw-aalen.de Copyright 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.