The Impact of Social Business Process Management on Policy-making in e-Government

The combination of social media and Business Process Management (BPM) has given rise to the emerging field of “social BPM”. The new development of social BPM is expected to provide benefits like flexibility for knowledge-intensive processes, like policy-making. The goal of this paper is to understand the impact of social BPM on policy-making. We first present a literature survey showing that social BPM is a new and emerging research area and limited attention has been given to social BPM in egovernment. The literature reviews showed a lack of empirical research into the accomplished benefits of social BPM. To bridge this gap, a comprehensive case study in a Dutch government social BPM platform was conducted. While not all the benefits suggested in the literature were identified in the case study, negative impact of social BPM were also found. A tension was found between accomplishing flexibility and accountability and user efficiency.