Reactive or Proactive Process Mining? Why not Both?

For the longest time, Process Mining has been primarily thought as a way to do business process improvements by looking at the execution history of these processes. By nature, this exercise resembles a “reactive” action that looks at what happened to improve the future. Organizations find inefficiencies, they address some of these and sometime in the future (months, quarters, years), they re-mine the same business process and assess its health state. Have we eradicated the previously identified inefficiencies? Are there new inefficiencies to tackle this time around. Well, there is nothing wrong with this. It is the stereotype and status quo of how organizations leverage Process Mining these days.

BUT…, it does not have to be ONLY this way. We can extend this practice to performing more frequent (daily, weekly) “reactive” health-checks. This complementary practice leverages Process Mining for more “pro-active” business process analysis.

With ServiceNow’s Process Mining, it is possible to create “Findings”. These are easy to define filters that help you identify business process paths that are inefficiencies. Every time you re-mine your process, these findings will report the results for a given mining snapshot. If you happen to implement a remediating action for these inefficiencies, these Finding snapshots should show a trend indicating whether the instrumented actions are working or not. The more frequent you do this, the closer you will be to understanding if your remediation actions work or not.

Another great capability of ServiceNow’s Process Mining is the “Automated Findings”. Over time, and after working with lot of our customers and partners, we have identified common workflow inefficiency patterns such as multiple group reassignments before the incident, case or other entity are assigned to the right individual that can process the work. Or ping-pong situations where cases are not really resolved and experiment long back and forth cycles before they can be legitimately closed. These “Automated Findings” can surface diagnosis situations you may be aware of, but with very specific data points that will help you address the specific challenges. As you mine more pro-actively, you can analyze the trends of these findings and make sure these inefficiencies are within controlled boundaries or whether you need to act fast.

Bottom line, the debate is not whether you should invest in “reactive” or “proactive” Process Mining, but why not do both, right?

Are you ready to rip the benefits of this approach? What are your thoughts?