Ultimus Enhances BPM Suite with Twitter Updates for Business Process

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As technologies, such as Twitter, continue to refine themselves and grow in popularity, we find more and more ways to implement them in every aspect of our lives- the latest being the ability to use Twitter to update the status of your business processes. As mentioned in both Dr. Michael Rosemann and Sandy Kemsley's blog, there are three ways to incorporate Twitter in your BPM solution. They are as follows:

1. Using Twitter as a notification tool when changes are made to a process that you are currently involved in or following.
2. Integrate your process so that it follows you on twitter and keeps up with your schedule and availability. With this type of integration your process will know when you're unavailable and will re-route the task to an appropriate substitute for your role
3. Use Twitter to update other process participants of completed tasks, the status of a task, or the location of the task within the actual workflow.

Business processes represent traceable assets for your company that you can report on, communicate, and collaborate with others on. Thus integrating business processes to social sites is definitely catching traction in the BPM space for a few reasons:

• Social technologies have done a great job of offering easy to use integration capabilities (APIs) are part of their initial offerings
• The ability for process participants and/or external users to custom define how they wish to remain in contact with key process activities is what I believe to be part of today's "awareness standard"
• Email alerts and notifications, while purposeful, many times do not provide enough explanation and "color" to what's really occurring

Re-purposing sites such as Twitter and FaceBook so that business processes can be followed is a great way to provide richness to process awareness outside of the confines of a BPM Suite's out-of-the-box offerings. Recently this convenient communication feature was added to the Ultimus Adaptive BPM Suite, giving process users the ability to define how they receive updates and to work more efficiently as a team.

 Is your company integrated with social networking sites like Twitter? If so, have you thought about using them to keep your co-workers informed?

Chris Adams
VP Product Marketing and Management
Ultimus