AU QUOTIDIEN

BIG DATA AND PROCESS MINING

MINE YOUR OWN BUSINESS
by Denislava Simeonova, DG DIGIT
This years DIGIT ICT Conference on 18 November in Brussels will look at how innovation
can help administrations face the challenges of performance and keep up with
technological progress. One of the keynote speakers, Wil van der Aalst, distinguished
Professor at Eindhoven University of Technology and Scientific Director of the Data
Science Center Eindhoven, tells us about how to use big data and process mining to
improve business processes.

What is process mining?

Process mining helps organisations to discover, moni-
tor and improve real processes by extracting knowl-
edge from event logs. Data is collected from all kinds
of systems and analysed to see the deviations from the
standard procedures and where the bottlenecks are.
This helps to improve processes.

What is important to know about the process

mining technique?
Documenting processes in the traditional way is very
open-ended and harmless because people can say
whatever they want. If you use process mining, you

are analysing the processes based on actual data, con-
fronting people with real facts and forcing them to
leave their comfort zone.
Currently, we are working with several Dutch hos-
pitals to analyse patient treatment data. We are looking
at when doctors and medical staff deviate from the
standard procedures, comparing the costs incurred and
the number of incidents. The results show that if people
deviate from the procedures more frequently this leads
to more incidents (fatalities) and higher costs.
What public sector organisations are already
using process mining?
The public sector is not very different from the bank-
ing sector. Process orientation is everywhere more
than 80% of Dutch municipalities are using software
to model their processes. But there are very few or-
ganisations that are actually using Business Process
Management technology to directly implement those
processes.
WVDA
The power of process mining is that it is based on
facts. It is not just an IT toy. It has the potential to bridge
the classical gap between managers/domain experts and
IT people insight based on real data can bring these
two groups together. You should first understand what
is really happening before thinking of beautiful ways
to do it better.
How can we integrate process mining with
the classical business modelling?
Process mining is fact driven, which makes it very dif-
ferent from other techniques. Of course, the classical
problems remain you should have a process owner
who is responsible for a particular process and you still
need to make a decision, no matter what technology
you are using. However, the fact that these days you
can base the decision-making on facts changes the dis-
cussion completely.

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 Ive been in many discussions where a part of the
PROCESS MINING
group says the problem is in that part of the process
and others say the problem is elsewhere. And when
you show the execution of the process visually for WORLD
example, what actually happened last year this typi- BUSINESS SUPPORTS/
PROCESSES CONTROLS
cally makes the discussion easier. PEOPLE SOFTWARE
MACHINES SYSTEM
How do we keep the meaning of COMPONENTS
ORGANISATIONS RECORDS
data synchronised with the different ES
EVENTS, E.G.,
transformations throughout the process? IFI URES MESSAGES,
EC S
SP NFIG ENT TRANSACTIONS,
If, for instance, a company builds a car, it makes a bill MODELS CO PLEM ES ETC
ANALYSES IM ALYS
of materials, as it is composed of an engine, tyres and AN
other parts. If you think about businesses where the
product is actually data, you also need a bill of materi- DISCOVERY
MODEL EVENT
als. These are the data that you need to be able to make
(PROCESS) CONFORMANCE LOGS
the decision. We call it product-driven workflow design
when you design the information product and then ENHANCEMENT
automatically derive the workflow from it.
Source: Processmining.org, Prof.dr.ir. Wil van der Aalst
Are there some general guidelines for
modelling processes? Another example lets suppose that you have an
It starts from data and analysis of data and then a activity and the customer is giving more information
process model is created which is different from the than you were asking for. In the traditional system, you
classical way of first modelling the control flow and dont know what to do with this information. You say
then adding data to it. People typically do not model to the customer: No, you cannot tell me this now (or
everything and keep models up to date, because it is a you will record the info for a further use that might
lot of work. My current view is that models are valu- never come). If you look at the prototype systems we are
able if they are connected to the actual event data of implementing, its different. People can provide data at

the processes taking place. And this is very different
from the typical practice people often spend months
creating Business Process Management diagrams, and
once it is on paper nobody cares. No matter what mod-
elling notation you use, if you make a model and do
not confront it with real data, it becomes useless and
unrelated to reality. My advice is to breathe life into
these models by maintaining them and linking them
to real-event data every day.
Take navigation devices. Why do people use them?
Because theyre not a static map, but a map you use
every day showing you where the traffic jams are,
advising you to turn left or right so there is a direct
link between current reality and the models.
# Septembre 2014
any moment about the activities being executed at that
point, but they can also choose to skip some steps and
at each point, the state of the process is recomputed,
based on the actual data. For example, if you have a
sequence of activities A, B, C after executing activ-
ity A, you may not need to execute activity B, because
you talked to somebody and the person provided more
information or the information is already available in
the system.
Used together with traditional process documenting
techniques, process mining is an incredible eye-opener and
makes the results of the analysis more accurate. J

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