Week of April 14th, 2009

Business Process Management, today.

Process Mining and the future of BPM.

By Ricardo Seguel P.

(Spanish version here)

We have started a new interview cycle for 2009.  On last year, we interviewed renowned academics that gave us their BPM vision.  This time, we are privileged to have Profesor Wil van der Aalst of Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), The Netherlands.

Professor Wil van der Aalst
Full Professor at Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands.
(See full profile here)

What are the biggest benefits for companies implementing BPM this year, considering the current economic crisis?

This is a good time for BPM. Organizations will need to be "lean and mean" and be more effective with less people.
BPM technology can help with this.
 

What’s the best strategy step-by-step for companies becoming BPM-oriented?

Organizations have a tendency to focus on implementation and process modeling, but know little about their own processes.  This is the key reason for using process mining first.  More and more information about business processes is recorded by information systems in the form of so-called "event logs''.  IT systems are becoming more and more intertwined with these processes, resulting in an "explosion'' of available data that can be used for analysis purposes.

Classical techniques in the field of Data Mining and the so-called Business Intelligence (BI) tools used in industry aim at knowledge discovery, performance measurement, and prediction without really making processes explicit.

The goal of process mining is to extract process-related information from event logs, e.g., to automatically discover a process model by observing events recorded by some information system. 

However, process mining is not limited to discovery and also includes conformance checking (investigating whether reality conforms to a given model and vice versa)
and extension (augmenting an existing model with additional insights extracted from some event log).

What are the technologies or tools that companies could start to use for improving their processes?

As indicated before, existing BI and data mining tools do not offer process mining functionality.  At Tu/e, we build on the ProM framework: a completely plug-able environment and serves as an excellent basis for all kinds of analysis.

ProM is the only comprehensive framework supporting a wide range of process mining techniques. Most other tools in this area only implement one specific technique and focus on a single perspective and technique.

Futura Reflect by Futura Process Intelligence, BPM|one by Pallas Athena, Comprehend by Open Connect,
Interstage Automated Business Process Discovery and Visualization by Fujitsu, Process Discovery Focus by Iontas,  and Enterprise Visualization Suite by BusinesScape are some examples of commercial tools that
offer some form of process discovery.   These tools offer only a fraction of the functionality provided already
by ProM. 

However, the emergence of such commercial tools illustrates the practical interest in process mining.  For example, Futura Process Intelligence and Pallas Athena have been selected as "Cool Vendor 2009" by Gartner
because of their process mining capabilities. Both tools use genetic process mining algorithms developed by us.
 

What’s your point of view about the past, present and future of Process Mining?

There is definitely a bright future for process mining. People realize that spending months on making subjective process models is a waste of time.  The problem of BPM is no longer of a technological nature; the systems to implement workflows are there, but they are not used properly.  Process mining allows for a more analytical approach based on facts rather than PowerPoints.  With the abundance of data this is no longer a dream but a reality.
 

What’s your point of view about the future of BPM and SOA?

The importance of SOA is overrated. Although the idea in itself is great, the web services stack has made systems
more complicated and slowed down organizations working on real business support. Standards in this area have resulted in a waste of energy.  

See for example the hype around BPEL. Few systems in reality use BPEL and these models are still system specific and not exchanged. Organizations bet on many horses at the same time, see SAP's initial support for BPEL and later support for executable BPMN and Microsoft's influence on BPEL while really working on the Windows Workflow Foundation. 

To make BPM successful the products should offer support that goes far beyond implementation.  Process analysis with techniques such as process mining, short term simulation, etc. are key.

April 14th 2009, Eindhoven, NL