A business worker is used to represent the role that a human, software or composite system* will play within the organization. This abstraction allows us to identify potential improvements in business processes and consider the effect of business process automation or business process outsourcing.

Stakeholders use business workers to confirm that the responsibilities and interactions of the business worker correctly reflect how work is performed, or should be performed. Business workers are also used for considering the impact of changes to the organization (such as business process automation). A business designer describes the realizations of each business use case using business workers. Business workers are also useful for systems analysts when identifying software system actors and use cases and deriving software requirements.

*Note: we distinguish such systems from business systems because of the specialized role they play in the business. For example, if an earthmoving business used large excavators, then - in operation - such devices can be regarded as systems: they will have a human operator and, at least in the larger, more complex varieties, use software in control systems, data logging etc. Such systems would not typically be regarded as business systems in their own right, and in business modeling are not further analyzed.