"Social" seems to be the buzz word, if not the implementation, in just about every enterprise application today. Some vendors have done a nice job identifying how to bring social into the realm of usability, while others seem to be delivering a lot of "check box" acknowledgement. Granted, the industry is in its early stages — with business process management vendors trying to figure out the right "formula" for integrating social with BPM.

At what point will your organization be ready to adopt a business process mindset and implement a process-focused way of working?

In today’s competitive market, you, or we,  would be hard pressed to find executives who do not want their companies to be better organized and more efficient. Most C-level leaders pepper their speeches and memos with messages that implore employees to find smarter ways of working, techniques that will maximize their business process improvement efforts and reduce or even eliminate repetitive tasks. The hope is that somewhere between "working smarter" and “a validated bottom-line improvement” some actions will occur that make that vision a reality. Unfortunately, that middle ground between desires and outcomes is usually where the best laid plans often go astray.

Smart businesspeople are always looking for ways to improve operations. "Faster is better" is often the mantra, as we humans are somewhat predisposed to looking for ways to arrive ‘there’ (wherever that may be) more quickly. In today’s technology-driven world, that means we usually default to looking at devices and software to help us get where we need to go faster than anyone else.