Tutorials

July 22, 2008: This page is a draft, please check back for the complete information.

Process Mining: Beyond Business Intelligence

Wil van der Aalst
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands

Schedule: Full Day

Abstract:

More and more information about processes is recorded in the form of event logs. Equipment ranging from embedded systems to enterprise information systems are logging the behaviors that take place. This data explosion allows for the analysis of reality and the construction of models that reflect what actually happened. This can be used to diagnose and improve processes in a variety of domains.

Especially business processes involving human actors are interesting to diagnose because these processes are not controlled by software and there may be a gap between what people think that happens and what really happens. Process mining provides a versatile and extendible way to analyze such processes. Using process mining techniques it is possible to extract different types of models from event logs, e.g., the construction of a process and organizational models. Moreover, other techniques support the conversion and analysis of models. Using conformance checking techniques models can also be compared with reality and existing models can be enhanced with additional information, e.g., indicating bottlenecks in a process.

Many vendors claim to offer support for Business Intelligence (BI). Unfortunately, these BI tools are not intelligent at all. Moreover, these tools require input data of a particular type and a predefined model. Process mining overcomes these limitations and makes it possible to extract new knowledge from information systems in a truly intelligent way.

Process mining addresses the problem that most organizations have very limited information about what is actually happening in their organization. In practice, there is often a significant gap between what is prescribed or supposed to happen, and what actually happens. Only a concise assessment of the organizational reality, which process mining strives to deliver, can help in verifying process models, and ultimately be used in a process redesign effort.

This tutorial aims to provide an overview of process mining techniques and, using many real-life examples, it will be shown how particular techniques can be applied and what kind of insights such analyses provide.