Over the recent years, Business Process Management (BPM) paradigm has become more socially driven. The socialization of processes has become an unavoidable way to realize flexible processes by including means to improve collaboration, knowledge sharing and collective decisions. However, the majority of current proposed approaches are limited to the exploitation of social technologies (social networks, blogs, wiki…), without providing a coherent conceptual and reusable framework, independent from those technologies. This paper defines precisely the social dimension to be taken into account in BPM and recommends a set of models to structure the design and development of Social BPM. In addition, a social ontology has been developed with Protege 5.0 and rules for inferring knowledge and queries for exploiting it have been implemented with SWRL and SPARQL.

Enterprise Information Systems are enjoying an extensive trajectory in the optimization of organizations worldwide, of which predominantly the Business Process Management (BPM) systems stand out for their great flexibility. BPM models describe business workflows and are highly useful in detecting errors and bottlenecks and in identifying possible improvements. On the other hand, educational management software tools offer a large number of functionalities, but have yet to take advantage of these techniques. Our main objective is to perform an empirical analysis in this unexplored area to evaluate the advantages of applying BPM in the implementation of innovative and dynamic teaching activities.

Using this methodology, we have designed RubricaSoft, a BPM system focused on providing dynamic educational processes. It automates multiple tasks, including peer evaluation, information integration and the management of deadlines. The results have been very promising from the point of view of the three axes upon which the evaluation has been carried out: satisfaction of students, improvement in academic results and increase in the productivity of teachers. In one of the processes, the time spent by the teacher has been reduced by 80% and student participation increased by 41%.