Modeling Change in Business Processes

Business processes are regularly modified either to capture requirements from the organization’s environment or due to internal optimization and restructuring. Implementing the changes into the individual work routines is aided by change management tools. These tools aim at the acceptance of the process by and empowerment of the process executor. They cover a wide range of general factors and seldom accurately address the changes in task execution and sequence. Furthermore, change is only framed as a learning activity, while most obstacles to change arise from the inability to unlearn or forget behavioural patterns one is acquainted with. Therefore, this paper aims to develop and demonstrate a notation to capture changes in business processes and identify elements that are likely to present obstacles during change. It connects existing research from changes in work routines and psychological insights from unlearning and intentional forgetting to the BPM domain. The results contribute to more transparency in business process models regarding knowledge changes. They provide better means to understand the dynamics and barriers of change processes.