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.

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.