Integrating Social Media and Business Process Management: Exploring the Role of AI Agents and the Benefits for Agility

Business Process Management (BPM) faces increasing societal and business challenges. Societal issues include effectively managing unexpected changes and ensuring employee engagement during process modifications. The former category involves the limitations of technology when introducing process changes while Agile BPM and Social BPM concepts have been explored in previous studies to tackle the latter. These investigations have resulted in the development of a Social-Media (SM) based BPM platform and an agility framework. The SM platform draws inspiration from popular social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram. Its primary objective is to merge the design-time and run-time phases of the business process (BP) lifecycle as well as to actively engage stakeholders in the dynamic design and implementation of BPs. By simplifying the response to potential changes and maintaining stakeholder involvement throughout the process, the platform addresses the aforementioned challenges. This article establishes a correlation between SM platform concepts and BPM concepts, emphasizing how they facilitate the concurrent design and execution of BPs. Furthermore, the article demonstrates the application of the SM platform in implementing the agility framework through a use case analysis involving a scientific paper submission process. To overcome the current emphasis on stakeholder involvement and human capabilities in applying the platform, we finally explore the possibilities of employing AI agents as automated assistants.