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Don’t share if you don’t want to

Over the past few weeks I have done a number of presentations of AlignSpace and I had an even greater number of conversations around it. All these discussions are lively and healthy and they help me understand how the concept of Social BPM is perceived.
 

The number one concern that I hear every single time is something like this: “We don’t want to do process discovery for our processes on a public site. In fact, we don’t want to expose any internal process information to others as these processes are the essence of our competitive advantage. A collaborative platform is fine, but we only want to collaborate internally. Can we please have a version of AlignSpace that can be installed on our servers?”
 

Well, if you create a group on a site like LinkedIn or XING, you decide if it should be a public group that is visible and open to everyone. If you want to create a private group over which you want to have full control in terms of who is allowed to see and access it, you simply set it up that way.
 

With BPM projects on AlignSpace it is going to be the same way: Invite only the people to your project that you want to participate and hide it from the rest of the world.
 

Having said that, there was a time when open source software did not exist and where companies protected their code. I am not saying that we’ll soon have process design in an open source fashion, but then again you never know.
 

Feedback and comments are welcome.

Thanks,
Thomas
 

This entry was posted on 27.04.2009 19:27 by Thomas Stoesser. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, leave a trackback from your own site or Delicious bookmark this on Delicious
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4 Responses

  1. 1. Mike Lees
    28.04.2009 15:03

    It's my belief that the community will start to find a natural equilibrium between the content that is non-differentiating and generates value for the community through re-use/sharing and content that is differentiating and needs to be held private. There is a tremendous amount of content out there already that falls into the former category but there are limited mechanisms that allow it to be shared effectively.

  1. 2. Theo Priestley
    28.04.2009 16:47

    It's an interesting dilemma, but one which will be solved through education and communication, again one of the core elements of AlignSpace itself.

    I think the crux of this exists in people's perceptions of social networks and the visibility of the information sites like MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter give. However like Thomas has pointed out, areas can be locked down completely to maintain integrity and privacy of any group, forum or personal info that is set up.

    Why should AlignSpace be any different ?
    It isn't thankfully, otherwise it goes against it's own design principles.

  1. 3. Scott
    17.05.2009 00:53

    I think this problem is largely addressed by pointing these folks at salesforce.com, and even within the space of process discovery Lombardi's Blueprint is already up and running and people use it for discovery and yet still keep processes shared only within the boundaries of their own organization. Just be ready for all the security audits!

    scott

  1. 4. Thomas
    19.05.2009 13:35

    Yes, I fully agree. And I am already expecting those security audits. :)

    Thanks,
    Thomas

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