An experiment on the capture of business processes from knowledge workers

Abstract

This paper describes an experiment on the capture of business processes' tacit knowledge owned by knowledge workers. During the experiment, knowledge workers used a functional prototype to achieve a set of goals described to them in natural language. To achieve these goals, they needed to create a set of informational objects. By inspecting these objects, it is possible to decide on the success of a business process instance. The experiment hypothesis states that by enhancing the tool with a recommender system, the nomenclature used by the knowledge workers converges. The experiment took 13 subjects and a confederate. Results show that the proposed approach, empowered with a contextual recommender system, allows work practices to converge, and thus, tacit knowledge to be captured using a practice-oriented strategy. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.