Project Description, Goals and Objectives:

Business process management (BPM) and workflow systems have had tremendous success in the past two decades with respect to both mindshare and deployment. We can safely consider service-oriented architecture (SOA) BPMs most recent manifestation to be a business-as-usual design practice. On the other hand, we are observing enterprises exploring, if not even embracing, social computing as an alternative for executing more unstructured yet team-based collaborative, outcome-based strategies. Gartner predicts that by 2015, we will observe a deeper penetration of social computing for the business as more enterprises struggle to deal with the rigidity of business process techniques. Such methods are suitable for menial tasks but in when it comes to supporting business users who must deal with more complex decision making. However, a huge gap clearly exists between BPMs technologies, usage patterns, and workflows on the one hand, and social computing as it is known today.
The goal of this our collaboration is to introduce a framework that establishes the interactions of business processes and workflows with a concept called Social Compute Units (SCU) an abstraction of a team consisting of human resources that bring together the appropriate expertise to solve a given problem. The SCU abstraction treats the SCU as a programmable entity. The resources that make up a SCU are socially connected. The term socially implies connectedness of an individual beyond his or her organizational scope. The reason for connectedness could be prior ad-hoc collaborations but also collaboration within a given scope of responsibility where the scope is distributed across organizational verticals.