Process mining techniques are able to extract knowledge from event logs commonly available in today’s information systems. These techniques provide new means to discover, monitor, and improve processes in a variety of application domains. There are two main drivers for the growing interest in process mining. On the one hand, more and more events are being recorded, thus, providing detailed information about the history of processes. On the other hand, there is a need to improve and support business processes in competitive and rapidly changing environments. This manifesto is created by the IEEE Task Force on Process Mining and aims to promote the topic of process mining. Moreover, by defining a set of guiding principles and listing important challenges, this manifesto hopes to serve as a guide for software developers, scientists, consultants, business managers, and end-users. The goal is to increase the maturity of process mining as a new tool to improve the (re)design, control, and support of operational business processes

The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is an increasingly important industry standard for the graphical representation of business processes. BPMN offers a wide range of modeling constructs, significantly more than other popular languages. However, not all of these constructs are equally important in practice as business analysts frequently use arbitrary subsets of BPMN. In this paper we investigate what these subsets are, and how they differ between academic, consulting, and general use of the language. We analyzed 120 BPMN diagrams using mathematical and statistical techniques. Our findings indicate that BPMN is used in groups of several, well-defined construct clusters, but less than 20% of its vocabulary is regularly used and some constructs did not occur in any of the models we analyzed. While the average model contains just 9 different BPMN constructs, models of this complexity have typically just 4-5 constructs in common, which means that only a small agreed subset of BPMN has emerged. Our findings have implications for the entire ecosystems of analysts and modelers in that they provide guidance on how to reduce language complexity, which should increase the ease and speed of process modeling.

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This paper presents a case study of the development of standards in the area of cross-organizational workflows based on web services. We discuss two opposing types of standards: those based on SOAP, with tightly coupled designs similar to remote procedure calls, and those based on REST, with loosely coupled designs similar to the navigating of web links. We illustrate the standardization process, clarify the technical underpinnings of the conflict, and analyze the interests of stakeholders. The decision criteria for each group of stakeholders are discussed. Finally, we present implications for both the workflow and the wider Internet communities.

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