There have long been a few fundamental challenges associated with business process management, at least for as long as the two of us have been involved with the field (forty years or so, for better or worse). Two of the most troublesome problems, in our view, are at least partially responsible for the fact that process management and improvement is, among many companies, a back-burner issue at the moment. But a relatively new and innovative technology, process mining, has the capability to solve both of the problems and to revitalize process management in firms where it has lain fallow for years.
What Process Mining Is, and Why Companies Should Do It
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There have long been a few fundamental challenges associated with business process management. But a relatively new and innovative technology, process mining, has the capability to revitalize process management in firms where it has lain fallow for years. One problem involves the creation of “current state” processes — a description of how a business process is being performed today. In business process reengineering, organizations are primarily interested in an improved “to be” process, so often they have little interest in exploring “as is,” or how the process is currently performed. The other general problem with process management is the lack of connections between business processes and an organization’s enterprise information systems. Enter process mining. Process mining software can help organizations easily capture information from enterprise transaction systems and provides detailed — and data-driven — information about how key processes are performing. It creates event logs as work is done: an order is received, a product is delivered, a payment is made. The logs make visible how computer-mediated work is really happening, including who did it, how long it takes, and how it departs from the average. Process analytics create key performance indicators for the process, which enables a company to focus on the priority steps to improve.
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