Abstract
Process mining has a history of over two decades of published research papers and case studies started to appear a bit over a decade ago. In this paper we review these published process mining case studies to assess the maturity of the field from a practice point of view by considering (i) diffusion of tools and techniques into practice, and (ii) the thoroughness of the application of process mining methodologies. Diffusion is assessed by analysing the breadth of domains to which process mining has been applied and the variety of tools and techniques employed. We define measures of thoroughness for each of the various phases of a generalised process mining methodology and examine case studies identified from a literature search against these measures. We conclude that, despite maturing in terms of diffusion, application of process mining in practice has not seen an increased maturity over time in terms of thoroughness. One way to redress this situation is to pay more attention to the development of and adherence to methodological guidance.
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Notes
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The numbers of papers in each domain rather than traction of the field in these domains could also be representative of other factors such as the number of journals and conferences in that area, the review policy etc.
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A detailed analysis of different process mining algorithms, their advantages and disadvantages is not within the scope of this paper.
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Affiliation other than Computer Science or Information Technology department.
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Our analysis showed that since 2010, Alpha Miner has stayed among the three top algorithms used in process mining case studies.
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The Process Mining Manifesto challenges C10: Improving Usability for Non-Experts and C11: Improving Understandability for Non-experts remain challenges to this day.
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Acknowledgements
The contributions to this paper of R. Andrews were supported through ARC Discovery Grant DP150103356.
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Emamjome, F., Andrews, R., ter Hofstede, A.H.M. (2019). A Case Study Lens on Process Mining in Practice. In: Panetto, H., Debruyne, C., Hepp, M., Lewis, D., Ardagna, C., Meersman, R. (eds) On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: OTM 2019 Conferences. OTM 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11877. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33246-4_8
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