Modeling Business Processes from Work Practices Marielba Zacarias and Paula Ventura Martins Research Center for Spatial and Organizational Dynamics Algarve University, Gambelas, Faro - Portugal {mzacaria,pventura}@ualg.pt Abstract. Business process modeling methodologies need to pay atten- tion to (1) the changing and distributed nature of business process, and (2) the contextual and tacit nature of the knowledge that operational actors have regarding business process. However, available methodolo- gies offer little guidance to these concerns. This paper describes how to model business process models from work practices, using the BAM methodology. BAM is a methodology for business process modeling, su- pervision and improvement that works at two dimensions; the dimension of processes and the dimension of work practices. The paper illustrates BAM’s business process discovery approach, which encompasses learning and modeling subphases, with a case study in an organizational setting. Keywords: business process modeling, work practice modeling. 1 Introduction Business process modeling (BPM) specializes on describing how activities inter- act and relate with each other, as well as their relationship with other business concepts such as goals and resources, where resources may be informational entities and human or automated actors. Business Process Modeling (BPM) methodologies are supported by data collection techniques including interviews, surveys, text/document analysis, among others. Nevertheless, it is argued that existing BPM methodologies are not appropriate to elicit the continuously evolv- ing knowledge that is required in building business process models. Process- centric approaches tend to emphasize process (workflow, decision, information, activities) as the dominant dimension [1]. However, BPM would benefit from a better understanding of other elements that contribute to process execution such as interactions between activities, people, products, information and other resources. A further limitation stems from the tacit nature of process knowledge. Indeed, many organizations simply do not know their end-to-end processes ac- curately or in detail, since their process knowledge is tacit and decentralized [2]. Recent research in BPM is aiming to address the unpredictability of business processes [3,4], but there is yet little guidance in how to address the problem of tacit knowledge business process model maintenance. M. Bajec and J. Eder (Eds.): CAiSE 2012 Workshops, LNBIP 112, pp. 440–454, 2012. c  Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012