Process mining has gained more significance than ever before due to the nature of business dynamics which changes time to time. An enterprise constantly needs to change its business functioning by looking for opportunities to improve the way its business is performed. Business process improvements coupled with analytics provide valuable insights into the intricacies of the business functions. While process improvements provide opportunities to optimize business functioning, in due course of time with business changes both within and outside the enterprise, a re-look into the complete business may seem to be essential. More and more new business processes would have spawned with the ever increasing business changes. Process mining helps identifying the processes which had grown over time.
The current process mining tools involve auditing and examining the system logs for discovering the process. This may definitely help, but by building processes based on system logs would paint a picture of system perspective of the business rather than the actual business operation itself. What may still augment the auditing of system logs is to probe the business analyst on his day to day activities which may capture what an analyst does outside the system to fulfill the business operation.
Often, most of the business operations are handled with system constraints. These exceptions would ideally constitute most of the recently changed business operations while IT is busy enhancing the system. Since system logs could never capture what is handled outside the system, process mining tools miss a huge chunk of critical process changes that had happened recently and which is by far most relevant contextually. What is handled outside the system is the hotbed for process mining activities, since most of the business changes would have operationalized by circumventing the systems to achieve those goals in short run.
Process mining tools may be limited by the technology available today, however a futuristic process mining tool should be capable enough to probe the day to day activities of a Business Analyst by capturing his browser activities, recording his telephone conversations and converting his/her on-field activities into operational semantic data. Such data not only give great insights into existing business functions, but would also provide with tremendous opportunities for completely revamping the business process for increased operational efficiency. With the advent of cloud computing the possibilities to increase process efficiency is infinite.
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