Starting Point: Bridging the Gap Between Data and Processes

At the beginning of 1999, I wrote a research proposal with the title “Process Design by Discovery: Harvesting Workflow Knowledge from Ad-hoc Executions”. In the proposal, I defined process mining as “distilling a structured process description from a set of real executions”. At the time, there were over 200 workflow management systems that all had problems supporting the dynamism of real-life processes involving people. Only highly structured and stable processes could be supported properly. Therefore, adding flexibility to workflow systems was one of the main research topics. Instead of adding more flexibility mechanisms, I proposed to use information about the actual process executions to infer a workflow model (expressed in terms of a Petri net) and use the model to automatically improve processes while they are running.

Read Celonis' Chief Scientist, Wil van der Aalst, column in CRN India here.