Social workflows—Vision and potential study

Author-Highlights•Introduction of social workflows as a new research area.•Positioning of social workflows w.r.t. a classification of related research.•Potential analysis and identification of specific application domains for social workflows.•Development of concepts for a social workflow platform.•An evaluation of the expected benefits using an online survey.

Social workflows pervade peoples׳ everyday life. Whenever a group of persons works together on a challenging or multifaceted task, a social workflow begins. Unlike traditional business workflows, such social workflows aim at supporting processes that contain personal tasks and data. In this work, we envision a social workflow service as part of a social network that enables private individuals to construct social workflows according to their specific needs and to keep track of the workflow execution. The proposed features for a social workflow service could help individuals to accomplish their private goals. The presented idea is contrasted with established research areas and applications to show the degree of novelty of this work. It is shown how novel ideas for knowledge management, facilitated by a process-oriented case-based reasoning approach, support private individuals and how they can obtain an appropriate social workflow through sharing and reuse of respective experience. Two empirical studies confirm the potential benefits of a social workflow service in general and the core features of the developed concept.