Interpreting Overlaps in Business Process Mapping via Organisational Soft Knowledge Flows

Knowledge Management (KM) as the term implies, is broadly about improving knowledge use within an organisation. At a lower level, Business Process Management (BPM) is the set of management activities related to business processes that can ideally be arranged in a life cycle. Social Network Analysis (SNA) is a technique enabling the researcher to better understand interactions between people. Relatively little research has been conducted with regard to the crossover of social networks and workflows, with the aim of examining workflows as management views them, as opposed to the actual social interactions of staff. Improvements in the overlay of management interpretations of work and real social networks could potentially lead to improvements in business process efficacy. In this study SNA diagrams are examined in order to implement executable models and potentially enable automated analysis of workflows. A means of converting SNA data to Business Process workflows is presented and an example provided.