Back in 2008, I started attending the annual academic research BPM conference, which was in Milan that year. I’m not an academic, but this wasn’t just an excuse for a week in Europe: the presentations I saw there generated so many ideas about the direction that the industry would/should take. Coincidentally, 2008 was also the first year that I saw process mining offered as a product: I had a demo with Keith Swenson of Fujitsu showing me their process discovery product/service in June, then saw Anne Rozinat’s presentation at the academic conference in September (she was still at Eindhoven University then, but went on to create Fluxicon and their process mining tool).
Over the years, I met a lot of people at this conference who accepted me as a bit of a curiosity; I brought the conference some amount of publicity through my blog posts, and pushed a lot of software vendors to start showing up to see the wild and wonderful ideas on display. They even invited me to give a keynote in 2011 on the changing nature of work. Two of the people who I met along the way, Marlon Dumas of University of Tartu and Marcello La Rosa of University of Melbourne, went on to form their own process mining company, Apromore.
I’ve recently written a white paper for Apromore to help demystify the use of process mining alongside more traditional process modeling techniques by business analysts. From the introduction:
Process modeling and process mining are complementary, not competitive, techniques: a business analyst needs both in their toolkit. Process mining provides exact models of the system-based portions of processes, while manual modeling and analysis captures human activities, documents informal procedures, and identifies the many ways that people “work around” systems.
Head on over to their site to read the full paper (registration required).