Process Mining: Spreadsheet-Like Technology for Processes

Spreadsheets can be viewed as a success story. Since the late seventies spreadsheet programs have been installed on the majority of computers and play a role comparable to text editors and databases management systems. Spreadsheets can be used to do anything with numbers, but are unable to handle process models and event data. Event logs and operational processes can be found everywhere. Recent breakthroughs in process mining resulted in novel techniques to discover the real processes, to detect deviations from normative process models, and to analyze bottlenecks and waste. Comparable to spreadsheet programs like Excel which are widely used in finance, production, sales, education, sports, process mining software can be used in a broad range of organizations. Whereas spreadsheets work with numbers, process mining starts from event data with the aim to analyze processes. This keynote paper uses spreadsheets as an analogy to make the case for process mining as an essential tool for data scientists and business analysts. 1 Spreadsheets: Handling Numbers A spreadsheet is composed of cells organized in rows and columns. Some cells serve as input, other cells have values computed over a collection of other cells (e.g., taking the sum over an array of cells). Richard Mattessich pioneered computerized spreadsheets in the early 1960-ties. Mattessich realized that doing repeated "what-if" analyses by hand is not productive. He described the basic principles (computations on cells in a matrix) of today's spreadsheets in (Mattessich, 1964) and provided some initial Fortran IV code written by his assistants Tom Schneider and Paul Zitlau. The ideas were not widely adopted because few organizations owned computers. The first widely used spreadsheet program was VisiCalc ("Visible Calculator") developed by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, founders of Software Arts (later named VisiCorp). VisiCalc was released in 1979 for the Apple II computer. It is generally considered as Apple II's "killer application", because numerous organizations purchased the Apple II computer just to be able to use VisiCalc. In the years that followed the software was ported to other platforms including the