What is Process Mining & How Does It Work
Manifestos usually bring to mind political bomb throwers or ego-mad artists. But in 2011, a group of nerdy engineers published what they considered a revolutionary document that defined the principles of a new discipline in business intelligence.
Called The Process Mining Manifesto and released by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the paper argued that by using techniques in data mining and business-process modeling, managers could peer into the digital guts of their organization to monitor core processes, find faults, and improve them.
Think of process mining as a kind of MRI for the enterprise. Because every facet of modern IT infrastructure generates event log data, capturing interactions between humans and bots on the system, process mining can analyze those event logs to create rich models of real-time system functions.
The emergence of process-mining software in recent years is one reason why the process analytics market is expected to grow from $185.3 million in 2018 to $1.4 billion globally by 2023, according to a recent ResearchandMarkets study.
“It is a very valuable technology that is also very generic,” says Wils van der Aalst, a Dutch computer scientist who is known as the godfather of process mining. “It can be applied to hospitals, governments, airports, production companies, anything.”
Data scientists like van der Aalst have been studying process mining since the early 1990s. There wasn’t a lot of data to work with back then, so no one paid much attention. But now that so many business processes are digitized and throwing off huge volumes of data, “many organizations feel they need to do something with that data,” says van der Aalst.
Often, they’re not sure what. Under pressure to launch digital transformation initiatives to boost productivity, reduce costs, and improve customer service, many executives end up throwing money blindly at these projects with little understanding of the underlying processes they are intended to improve.
In one recent study, 45% of executives said they had no idea where to even start on digital transformation initiatives. Nearly two thirds said they set transformation KPIs without determining what the actual problems are in their core operations. Unsurprisingly, most digital transformation initiatives ultimately fail.
Many companies would improve their odds if they first examined their core business processes to see how efficiently (or not) they get things done. Enter process mining: “If you’re responsible for large numbers of existing processes, you owe it to yourself” to look into using these tools, says Paul Harmon, a business management expert on the IEEE’s Process Mining Task Force and an analyst with BPTrends Associates.
As process mining software analyzes data, it constructs a “digital twin” of myriad IT processes. The mining tools can target any system—for example, enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), or IT services. Any system that generates event logs can be analyzed and “twinned” through process mining.
