Social Technology and Business Process Reengineering 2.0

Posted by Joe Antle on March 25, 2010, 3:50 PM EDT

The Internet provided new ways to display information and streamline public information access and distribution.  While not called "business process redesign" per se, the potential to radically improve internal, external and collaborative and interactive use of information to drive out costs, improve quality, enhance stakeholder relationships and reinvent cumbersome, yet critical processes should be a huge area of interest among forward-thinking leaders sooner than later.

The 80's and early 90's were the domain of business process reengineering when it was clear that incremental changes through the simple use of total quality management techniques to improve poorly performing processes involving people were not enough to meet the needs of cost reduction, quality and throughput.  So, these models thrived during the recession of the early 90's and seemed to get lost in the euphoria of the age of the Internet.  The age of the Internet seemed to live as a content publishing paradigm and many of the models for supporting such approaches were paid for with an old media model-sell ads or sell the right to post content.  Some were funded through large amounts of investment capital through public sources and private as well.  

But while the advertising and/or investor as primary funding models seems to be the primary modus operandi to date, interestingly some other models have used the Internet in boldly and radically redesigned business process approaches, such as with E-Bay (which created the notion of a transactional marketplace for buyers and sellers), travelocity,.com/expedia.com/orbitz.com and hotels.com and e-business portals such as successful ones by Cisco and Dell, among others.  These approaches while often classified as "marketplace initiatives" are in fact more easily thought of as business process reengineering using the Internet as a platform.  And even SaaS, or software as a service, is a kind of radical redesign of the processes by which software can be procured, distributed and paid for.

So, this means that some companies may find that social business computing or Enterprise 2.0 can be viewed from the lens of business process redesign and reengineering and they can identify specific places where benefit can be derived.  While this may be more complicated due to the unique mores of communities and their self-organizing and self-managing cultures at times, there will still emerge opportunities to leverage the platforms for more mission-critical business communications work and that will require technology and business rules that may seem a bit different than the current "social media" model of large scale and open community formation we see today.  

There have been predictions around future directions and trends for the Internet since the technology became mainstream back in the early to mid-1990's.  Here is one I'd offer, albeit with a disclaimer that no formalized research backs it up.  Social technologies will bring back a resurgence to business process redesign efforts.  And iIn the end, the migration to more controllable, secure and flexible/customizable platforms for "social business technology" or "social computing" or "Enterprise 2.0" will inevitably be a way to leverage the Internet and self-publishing as a foundation for radical business process redesign-or "Reengineering 2.0".