Accelerating Process Modeling with Process Mining

Excerpt

1. About the author
   Sandy is an industry analyst and technical strategy consultant specializing in digital process automation. With many years of hands-on systems implementation experience, she works with large organizations on their...
    
2. Introduction
   Process modeling (or mapping) is a fundamental part of every business analyst’s work. The analysis of a business operation starts with a model of how work flows between people and systems, and the tasks that are performed along the way. Usually, these models are created by business analysts who interview subject matter experts, observe human activities, read through system manuals and procedure guides, then manually draw their understanding of the process. The models are used by business people to understand their operational procedures and plan performance improvements, and are also a communications tool between business and IT teams when discussing system changes and upgrades. The problem is that these models are almost...
    
3. The drive towards analytical techniques
   Analytical techniques in process discovery and improvement, including process mining and simulation, have been available for many years. In the past, however, they were used primarily by people with a technical analytical background. The current business environment and technological advances have pushed these analytical tools into the mainstream, where they are being recognized as essential for all levels of business analysts. Although we tend to attribute all business and technology changes in these times to the pandemic, there are many complex factors involved in this move to analytical techniques for process improvement...
    
4. Process Mining and modeling for business analysts
   The key focus for many business analysts is to create business documentation using process modeling tools and text-based description, rather than performing in-depth analysis of business processes. Documenting current processes and procedures in this way has value, but it’s not really analysis, and it is unlikely to discover opportunities for radical improvement. Business analysts gather information through observation...
    
5. Process Mining in goal traceability
   Although process mining is a powerful tool for business analysts as described above, data-driven analytical tools have direct benefits to business architects. Business architects are concerned with the traceability of business objectives: being able to identify top-level business goals, map those to departmental or business capability goals, then directly to metrics at the operational process level. Once executives agree on corporate goals, that traceability ensures that processes are designed to work towards those goals, and the front-line workers are being rewarded for performing tasks that contribute to the goals. Without that, those...
    
6. Process Mining for operational management
   The analysis provided by process mining can have far-reaching impacts for operational managers since it provides total transparency into how their processes actually work. With broad knowledge of their own business area, operational managers can interpret the analysis for the purposes of continuous improvement beyond just process improvement...
    
7. Summary
   With today’s highly complex and volatile processes, organizations need much greater analytical strength to understand how their business actually works, and how to improve it. These processes are too complex to...

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