Integrating Social Media and Business Process Improvement: Value Propositions and Opportunities for Corporates

The pervasiveness of social media and the pressure for corporates to be more agile in delivering to customer needs and expectations has led organisations to more business process improvement initiatives. Social Media’s features can drive organisation responsiveness to customer needs and change. Although social media is used aggressively in many businesses across the world, integration with business process improvement has not be been researched. This research focuses on the integration of social media into the business process improvement lifecycle to alleviate the current problems experienced in business process improvement. This research explores the current business process improvement issues and challenges and the value propositions of social media. A qualitative approach was used to collect data via multiple rounds of questionnaires with experts in business process improvement and social media. A conceptual research framework is proposed. Results are interpreted against the framework, leading to findings that include challenges and limitations. In practical terms, the research shows the possibilities and potential of social media in business process improvement by facilitating transparency, ease of communication and reducing cost during economic downturns. Despite extensive research in social media and business process improvement in their own right, there has been little progress on how the social media can be used as a tool in delivering business process improvements for organisations. Social media is an excellent collaboration tool for collecting valuable information for analysis and design from a larger stakeholder group. This paper addresses a gap in the literature relating to some of potential benefits of social media in business process improvement.