Web 2.0 has the potential of having a greater impact on business process management (BPM) than Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and AJAX have had thus far. Business users are expecting to have the user experience with their ERP and CRM systems at the office that they get with YouTube and blogs at home.
The full impact that Web 2.0 will have on business in general and in particular how organizations handle business processes has not been envisioned by anyone.
Web 2.0 today is where AJAX was just two years ago. AJAX wasn't that big two years ago but now is the center of the Ultimus Human Service Bus (HSB). The Ultimus HBS is designed for the "human centric" process aspects of BPM.
A pre-Ajax business process might have required the user to fill out a form in Word or Excel and then attach it to an email in Outlook. This process then involved two different applications – Word and Outlook – that really weren't talking to each other directly. The Word file was sent via Outlook, but other than whatever note the user might type into the email explaining what the attachment was, there was no relationship between what was written in Word and the process Outlook was performing.
Now with AJAX it is possible to eliminate the separate form in Word and the Outlook attachment process. One day a process engineer will be able to create a process where the form document is shared via Ajax with the appropriate people in the process so this eliminates the need to attach a form document to an email and send it along. The information in the form becomes part of the process rather than being a separate document. the current social networking of consumer Web 2.0, which is about information sharing, will inspire the next generation of BPM.
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