Delineating Worker-Centered Organizational Work: Blending BPMS and Social Software Features

Nowadays, companies seek for new technological enablers and adopt new business models to cope with the frenetic pace of change. Such an effort is depicted in the Enterprise 2.0 initiative. Knowledgeable workers should be empowered so that they can help, through their knowledge, the organization they work for to thrive in the today’s highly demanding business environments. Empowerment concerns supporting them to easily gather the knowledge they need as well as to efficiently execute required tasks to accomplish business goals. To provide an efficient working aid, knowledge gathering and task execution should be supported through a unified environment. Towards identifying the features of such a unified environment, we conduct in this paper a two-phase analysis, which leads to the development of a coarse-grained conceptualization of this environment, reflecting a worker-centered organizational work model. This conceptualization is named Worker-Centered Organizational Work Wheel. The Wheel adopts features from both BPMS and social software to enable the integration of knowledge gathering and task execution. Apart from delineating how a knowledgeable worker should work, the Wheel also provides a roadmap showing what features should be offered by any implementation targeting this work model.