The Leonardo Blog

Organizations exist to exchange value with customers and other stakeholders - that’s strategy. They do this via a series of coordinated activities across a number of functional elements of the organization - that’s a process. It makes sense to optimize these processes so that they satisfy the requirements of customers and other stakeholders - that’s process improvement. Taking a coordinated view of the performance of all of the processes by which an organization exchanges value, optimizes performance - that’s process management. Process management allows organizations to focus on activities that create the value exchange outcomes described by the strategy - that’s execution.

Essential for all of practitioners leading Business Process Management is to maintain the right balance between capability and credibility. BPM leaders must demonstrate, not only that they have the knowledge and tools to deliver effective change, but that they also merit the trust of the organisations they seek to change

We don’t want five process analysts – we want 5000. Everyone needs to be a process analyst. We can’t leave the job of finding problems, opportunities for improvement, just to people who have the word ‘analyst’ in their job title.

This article provides a brief introduction to the data-driven, process-discovery technique called process mining. It compares traditional process modeling based on interviews and workshops with process mining. The authors also seek feedback to help understand the current perceptions of process mining. What is process mining? For any process-improvement project, understanding the current state, usually via as-is process models, is important. Stakeholders are interviewed, existing documents are reviewed, and a process model is created using a modeling tool. Such process models are mostly based on stakeholder perceptions of the process. This can be a good approach, possibly the only approach, for processes that are mostly manual. However, with increasing IT system involvement in process execution, there is a wealth of information recorded in various system or event logs. These traces present the facts—that is, evidence of real events that have happened or, in other words, the real as-is. Process mining creates a process model from the data in the traces or event logs, and this represents the current-state operation that is based, not on perceptions, but on hard evidence of what actually has happened.