Business process insight: An approach and platform for the discovery and analysis of end-to-end business processes

Abstract

Tracking and analyzing the execution of semistructured processes is essential for understanding process behavior and its evolution, increasing the effectiveness of business operations, and managing operational risk. A semi structured process is a single process from the perspective of the business but is executed across loosely coupled, heterogeneous, distributed systems and may be cross-organizational and contain human interactions and human decision making. Our goal is to enable the management of semi-structured processes by providing improved semi-automated visibility into their behavior and improved runtime management of their execution by leveraging process intelligence and process-aware analytics. In this paper we present a methodology, system architecture and implementation of a platform for end to end process insight and analytics for the full life-cycle of semistructured processes: from discovery through execution and evolution. We describe the algorithms employed and how they interact together to create a collaborative platform for business users to analyze and extract insight from such processes. © 2012 IEEE.