I had a facinating discussion with 2 propects and Aaron Zizter about communities and “business processes”. Many of the conversations I have with businesses (mostly large to mid sized) is around HOW they want to build & grow their community. The important item to realize is that business process (and the automation of them) are the key for most corporations.

The reason is simple – it lets you “scale” and “repeat” the complex or simple tasks and makes for a more productive workforce.

So if you focus on the business processes that need to be fixed then it creates one (of many) starting point for you to then get the right users (community members) and finally the use of several applications and technology (wikis, blogs, etc.) you have the starting need for a community and what is goal might be. True?

Why is it that when it comes to communities many believe that some of these truisms dont hold true?

Here are some of my explanations:

1. Its too simple an approach. Given that there are over 1000+ consultants for SEO alone, and over 2500 buzz words around PPC, CPM, BLAH, etc. why should everything old still be valid?

2. Communities put the people first and everything else later. Granted they still have to do something together for the greater good, but if your center of gravity is the community member, then the nodal questions change.

Do you find yourself asking these questions?
What do users want to do in a community? When do users use the community? What can we do for users to leverage the community more?

As opposed to:
What can we do to improve our invoicing with our partners by leveraging communities?  When is the best time to release our product so that it causes minimal disruption to our users?

3. Business processes are boring. Lets face it. Not many people really want to do repetitive work and handle only by exception. Its little value-add and lot more bottom line focused. But communities are fun, time wasting to a certain extent (gasp).

Do you agree? Why do you think people forget the basics or throw it out of the door when they want to start building communities?