Mining Social Networks: Uncovering Interaction Patterns in Business Processes

Abstract

Increasingly information systems log historic information in a systematic way. Workflow management systems, but also ERP, CRM, SCM, and B2B systems often provide a so-called "event log", i.e a log recording the execution of activities. Unfortunately, the information in these event logs is rarely used to analyze the underlying processes. Process mining aims at improving this by providing techniques and tools for discovering process, control, data, organizational, and social structures from event logs. This paper focuses on the mining social networks. This is possible because event logs typically record information about the users executing the activities recorded in the log. To do this we combine concepts from workflow management and social network analysis. This paper introduces the approach, defines metrics, and presents a tool to mine social networks from event logs. © Springer-Verlag 2004.