A Social Process Community could go beyond the recently announced Alignspace by Software AG.
Is there a motivation for customers to share business processes? Large enterprise customers run a lot of individual business processes and legacy applications. Some of them are considered as intellectual property and competitive differentiator. They never share any of those on a social process community. However, there are a lot of contextual standard processes in addition to these core processes and obviously it is not efficient to implement them from scratch on their process platform. Until now, most customers ran ERP systems and use some standard modules to supply these context business processes in addition to their customer business process landscape.
www.alignspace.com could be a breakthrough to share standard business processes in an open source style from one customer to the next. This would move more and more standardized business processes from the ERP vendors to the middleware vendors’ process platform. The customer’s challenge will be to sort out carefully their core differentiating and secret processes from the commodity stuff that can be shared without loosing any value.
See the full comment on Alignspace on Forrester’s blog.
