The Leonardo Blog

Ultimately, the aim of any business is to deliver on customers and stakeholders performance expectations, be it profit, market share, customer satisfaction or compliance – anything that will gain competitive advantage and add value to the organisation. Typically, a number of key measures are used to report on and manage the delivery of that performance. Too often, however, those measures only represent part of the picture.

Process mining shows great promise in improving process discovery, measurement and auditing, but Australian enterprises have been slow to take it up. This post will explore process mining and discuss some of its benefits, before asking readers to identify what’s holding them back from taking it up. We think it can deliver real and achievable results. Anecdotally, many people seem to feel the same way, but few have taken the step of putting it into practice. We’re interested in your thoughts, so feel free to offer your perspective at the end of this post.

The BPM support model in which a small number of people in a central unit do all of the process improvement work must ultimately fail; there is no way for it to survive its own success. Although it is very useful to have a central support group (an Office of BPM), it won’t, by itself, ensure widespread and continuous improving of processes. Success for a central group that starts out doing all of the improvement work will mean many requests for support from across the organization. Whatever the size of the central group, there will come a time when process improvement projects are on hold waiting for available resources. At this point the central process group is now the bottleneck preventing the improving of your processes! Dependence on a central group just doesn’t scale.

Why measure process performance? Because, if you don’t, all your process analysis and management efforts are a waste of time; you don’t have control over the things that really matter, and organizational decision-making can only be suboptimal. The only reason for doing process analysis, improvement and management is to improve organization performance in meaningful ways. Without measurement, we don’t know if there is improvement; we don’t know what is meaningful.