We had great fun hanging out with Hajo Reijers, Professor for Business Process Management & Analytics at Utrecht University, in last week’s Process Mining Café. You can now watch the recording here.

We started out with a short follow-up to our previous Process Mining Café, discussing utilization as another metric that is only available if you have start and complete timestamps.

The conversation then turned to how processes are made of people, and that process mining needs to be aware of that. With his focus on human-centric processes, Hajo is also interested in empirical research methods. He told us about the “think-aloud” protocol as one of the methods and shared some tips for researchers who are new to empirical research.

In the end, we picked two new process mining papers and discussed what we found interesting about them. One paper provides a framework to categorize the root causes of data quality problems. The other one uses statistical methods to uncover dependency relations between activities in a process and desired/undesired effects.

Here are the links to the two papers that we discussed and to the two main conferences publishing process mining research each year:

• Robert Andrews, Fahame Emamjome, Arthur ter Hofstede & Hajo Reijers. An Expert Lens on Data Quality in Process Mining. Proceedings of the 2020 2nd International Conference on Process Mining (ICPM), 2020.
• Jelmer J. Koorn, Xixi Lu, Henrik Leopold & Hajo Reijers. Looking for Meaning: Discovering Action-Response-Effect Patterns in Business Processes. Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM), 2020.
• ICPM conference: https://icpmconference.org
• BPM conference: https://bpm-conference.org

Enjoy the holidays, everyone! We’ll see you again in the new year!

Anne Rozinat

Market, customers, and everything else

• anne@fluxicon.com
• annerozinat
• @arozinat

Anne knows how to mine a process like no other. She has conducted a large number of process mining projects with companies such as Philips Healthcare, Océ, ASML, Philips Consumer Lifestyle, and many others.