Non-intrusive capture of business processes using social software: Capturing the end users' tacit knowledge

Abstract

The participation of end users on the collaborative design of business process models is particularly challenging because they do not master the existing formal business process modeling languages, and they regard business processes on a case-by-case perspective. On the other hand, end users wish to focus their efforts on their daily work and do not want to be interrupted with peculiar modeling tasks. However, regarding the importance of tacit knowledge about business processes, how can this end users' knowledge be captured non-intrusively? This paper presents an ad-hoc workflow system that focus on supporting and capturing human-interactions while using a non-intrusive strategy in the context of end users' daily operations, and with the support of social software features. Additionally, the information collected through this approach can readily be provided to other stakeholders, including other end users, fostering an implicit collaboration among them. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.