Process Mining Practices: Evidence from Interviews

Abstract

Process mining provides organizations with methods and techniques to extract knowledge from event logs. In their work, process analysts can draw from the wealth of techniques developed over the years by researchers and professionals. Still, there is limited understanding of how process mining is used in practice and, in particular, how individual analysts approach the analysis stage. Towards filling this gap, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 37 practitioners and academics working with process mining. Based on the results of the interviews, we characterize common analysis strategies and examine related challenges and factors affecting their use in practice. Our findings contribute to an improved understanding of process mining practices and provide a solid empirical basis for future research developing guidance and support addressing the practical needs of process analysts.

A visual approach to support process analysts in working with process improvement opportunities

“…We, on the other hand, explore how process analysts can be supported in identifying and analysing specific improvement opportunities derived from such comparisons. Furthermore, in an interview study of process mining practices (Zerbato et al, 2022), the authors investigate common strategies analysts use during the process analysis stage. However, the discussed strategies relate to the analysis, not their visualisations or how analysis can be facilitated with visualisations.…”

Supporting Provenance and Data Awareness in Exploratory Process Mining

“…In this section, we present an example process mining analysis derived from behavioral data we collected in two observational studies with more than 50 experienced process analysts overall [21,22]. We will refer to this scenario throughout the paper to illustrate the problems we address and the proposed solution.…”

“…As part of our evaluation, we used the prototype to replay scenarios from [22]. Our ultimate goal was to identify critical aspects for the implementation of the system that should be addressed before conducting a user evaluation.…”