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 semi-structured 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 semi-structured 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.