Data Warehouse Model for Audit Trail Analysis in Workflows

Business process performance evaluation is a key step towards assessing and improving e-business operations. In real-scale scenarios, such evaluation requires the collection, aggregation and processing of vast amounts of data, in particular audit trails. This paper aims at enabling such evaluation by integrating workflow technology with data warehousing. We first present a data model for capturing workflow audit trail data relevant to process performance evaluation. We then construct logical models that characterize the derivation of performance evaluation data from workflow audit trails. Based on these models, we apply dimensional modeling techniques to define schemas for storing workflow audit trail data in data warehouses. Using data warehouse technology, decision makers are able to query large volumes of audit trail data for business process performance evaluation.