LinkedIn Q&A - Awesome Business Tool

Have you ever used LinkedIn? If not, check it out. I've been on it since 2004. They keep adding capabilities to make it worthwhile to stay on. When I first joined, there were just over 1,000,000 members. Now they've grown to well over 9,000,000 members. I don't believe there are too many web communities for social networking that rival the types services or membership that LinkedIn has managed.

The latest feature they have added is a Q&A section. This is very powerful. I was able to choose between posing the question to only my connections, select connections or the entire membership. I chose the entire membership for a couple of reasons. I didn't want to pester my connections with another needless email from LinkedIn. Secondly, most power users probably filter LinkedIn to a folder or trash and choose to use the web site for staying current. And third, the full membership represents a mammoth potential. Imagine, 1 question to an audience of 9,000,000. 90% of these people are working adults worldwide. I'm bound to get a few answers. So what to ask...

Well it just so happens that I had a legitimate question and otherwise, didn't really have the time to chase down an answer, nor did I want to bother to many people with this question. So why not pose it to the LinkedIn community. Well I must say, than in the last 24 hours, the answers have been rolling in and some of them are quite good.

Ok, enough already! Here's the question with a little supporting detail:

How can "small" small businesses most effectively map their business processes when they are in rapid growth mode?

Business Process Mapping refers to activities involved in defining exactly what a business entity does, who is responsible, to what standard a process should be completed and how the success of a business process can be determined. Once this is done, there can be no uncertainty as to the requirements of every internal business process.

I'm interested in ideas and suggestions on effective techniques for mapping business processes in small service businesses in growth mode where the BPM can become both something to improve upon as well as a training tool for replicating the business.

This is a legitimate question, not easily answered concisely and in a thought provoking way, yet most that I've read so far are quite thought provoking. So, I don't know if you can get to the responses unless you are a member. And if you are a member, here is my profile if you do want to dig in to see some of these responses.