Towards an open, curious S-BPM community: eliciting stakeholder needs

The idea of Open S-BPM has been introduced some time ago. The aim of this idea is to establish a research platform with the focus on S-BPM for all interested stakeholders. However, very little is known about the critical factors necessary for facilitating and supporting a vivid community in general. In addition to this, very little is known about the Subject-oriented Business Process Management (S-BPM) community. This paper reports the results of an explorative, qualitative study on the S-BPM community. The aim of the study was to gain information about the expectations, feelings, needs, and motivations of possible community members in order to answer the question of for whom this community should be designed. Data has been gathered through in-depth interviews. The gained information will be used to identify requirements which will be incorporated in a design concept for the S-BPM community. Communities of practice are efficient tools for knowledge generation and sharing and will be a main constituent in the design concept.