Imagine you have just put a lot of time into your process mining analysis. You are proud of the results, and you start sharing them within your company. Only to be stopped by the Works Council who puts the brakes on your whole project because they did not hear about this before.

This is a real risk in countries like Germany and Austria, where the Works Council guards the rights of employees and how they can be evaluated by data. However, even if your organization does not have a Works Council, you want to be the person who proactively thinks about privacy, security, and ethics in your process mining project.

A topic like ethics might seem a bit scary and abstract to some of you, but it does not need to be. As we discussed with our guests Dirk Fahland and Felix Mannhardt from TU Eindhoven, ethics is something very concrete. You can distill it down into “doing something in the right way” or “doing a good job”.

How can you do a good job in your own process mining project? In our latest Process Mining Café, Dirk, Felix, and I shared many practical tips that you can start implementing today. We also discussed new research in the area of responsible data science. Watch the recording here if you missed the live broadcast or if you want to re-watch the conversation.

Thanks again to Dirk and Felix and to all of you for joining us!

Links

Here are the links that we mentioned during the session:

• Advanced Process Mining Course and Master Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at TU/e

• TPSA workshop at this year’s ICPM (see also the TPSA 2020 summary)

• Dennis Brons, Roeland Scheepens, Dirk Fahland: Striking a new balance in accuracy and simplicity with the Probabilistic Inductive Miner. CoRR abs/2109.06288 (2021); Presented at ICPM 2021

• See this project charter and this café session for an example of an Ethical Charter

• Anonymization functionality in Disco

• FACT (Fairness, Accuracy, Transparency, and Confidentiality) principles of Responsible Data Science

• Gamal Elkoumy, Stephan A. Fahrenkrog-Petersen, Mohammadreza Fani Sani, Agnes Koschmider, Felix Mannhardt, Saskia Nuñez Von Voigt, Majid Rafiei, Leopold Von Waldthausen: Privacy and Confidentiality in Process Mining: Threats and Research Challenges. ACM Trans. Manage. Inf. Syst. 13, 1, Article 11 (2022)

• A non-technical introduction to differential privacy

Contact us via cafe@fluxicon.com if you have questions or suggestions anytime.

In next week’s Process Mining Café, we will talk about privacy, security, and ethics in process mining.

Process miners need to be aware of their responsibility, both around the data and in how they present the analysis results. Together with our guests Dirk Fahland and Felix Mannhardt from TU Eindhoven, we will discuss practical tips and the state of process mining research in the area of responsible data science.

Join us on Wednesday 6 October, at 16:00 CEST! (Check your timezone here). Discuss with us about data protection methods, how you can establish a responsible culture in the organization, and get a glimpse of what researchers are contributing to this space.

As always, there is no registration required. Simply point your browser to fluxicon.com/cafe when it is time. You can watch the café and share your thoughts and questions while we are on the air, right there on the café website.

Tune in live for Process Mining Café by visiting fluxicon.com/cafe next week, Wednesday 6 October, at 16:00 CEST! Add the time to your calendar to make sure you don’t miss it. Or sign up for the café mailing list here if you want us to remind you one hour before the session starts.

There is often a divide between the strategy and the execution world in process mining. A process mining enthusiast who directly starts to apply the process mining tool can have difficulties creating a business case. At the same time, a manager who wants to use process mining to fulfill a strategic goal might have unrealistic ideas about what is possible and how long it will take.

In our latest Process Mining Café, Rudi and I were joined by the business expert manager Bogdan Ciungu from JTI to discuss how organizations can bridge this divide.

When you introduce process mining at your organization, understanding how the process mining tool works is not your only task. You also need to figure out who will be using it and when. So, you need to understand how you can integrate the process mining analyses into the current way of working. This, in turn, depends on the use case.

Furthermore, when you bridge the divide between strategy and execution, it makes a difference whether you are coming from the top-down perspective (RFI and tool selection) or are taking a bottom-up approach (building a business case from a concrete analysis).

Watch the recording here if you missed the live broadcast or if you want to re-watch the conversation.

Thanks again to Bogdan and Rudi, and to all of you for joining us!

Links

Here are the links that we mentioned during the session:

• We mentioned this camp talk by Sebastiaan van Rijsbergen from the Nationale Nederlanden as an example that shows how the organizational buy-in can be expanded after the initial process mining analysis.

• After showing the cost-saving example, we mentioned this case study by WoonFriesland and Zig Websoftware, which shows how process mining can also lead to more revenue.

• Here is the business case template that we shared with you as a starting point for your own process mining business case (also available in an Excel version and Numbers version).

Contact us via cafe@fluxicon.com if you have questions or suggestions anytime.

Join us for a new Process Mining Café next week!

This time, we are talking about strategy and execution. We see that there is often a divide between these two worlds: The people who are dealing with strategy are different from the people who are executing.

As a result, a process mining enthusiast who directly starts to apply the process mining tool might have difficulties creating a business case. At the same time, a manager who wants to use process mining to fulfill a strategic goal of their organization might have unrealistic ideas about what is possible and how long it will take.

In the upcoming Process Mining Café next week, Rudi and I will share the approaches that we see at different organizations to bridge this divide. Furthermore, we have invited Bogdan Ciungu from JTI to join the discussion. Bogdan is the ideal guest for this café because as a business expert manager he sits comfortably right between the strategy and the execution worlds.

Together, we will answer questions like: When should you make an RFI and when is it better to get started right away? What are the ingredients of a business case for process mining? Where in the organization should process mining be positioned? And which skills do you need to develop in the organization?

Join us on Wednesday 8 September, at 16:00 CEST! (Check your timezone here). Discuss with us how to best align your process mining initiatives with your strategic goals to make them successful.

As always, there is no registration required. Simply point your browser to fluxicon.com/cafe when it is time. You can watch the café and share your thoughts and questions while we are on the air, right there on the café website.

Tune in live for Process Mining Café by visiting fluxicon.com/cafe next week Wednesday 8 September, at 16:00 CEST! Add the time to your calendar to make sure you don’t miss it. Or sign up for the café mailing list here if you want to be reminded one hour before the session starts.

We are happy to announce that we have just released Disco 2.14.

This update fixes a number of bugs and annoyances, and it further improves the general performance and stability of Disco. We have also given the old Airlift tubes a good clean, and we updated all your favorite bank holidays, so we recommend that you update at your earliest convenience.

As always, your friendly bug reports and fantastic ideas are what’s powering all those software updates – So, thank you kindly, keep ‘em coming, and thanks for using Disco!

How to update

Disco will automatically download and install this update the next time you run it, if you are connected to the internet.

If you prefer to install this update of Disco manually, you can download and run the updated installer packages from fluxicon.com/disco/download

Changes

• Filter: Fixed a rare issue when filtering for certain attributes.
• Import: Fixed an issue with importing very small datasets.
• Airlift: Ensure the integrity of downloaded data.
• Airlift: Properly remember last connection.
• TimeWarp: Updated bank holidays calendars.
• Licensing: Properly handle unrestricted data sets.
• Platform: Check installation integrity on startup.