Introduction

Abstract

Information systems are becoming more and more intertwined with the operational processes they support. As a result, multitudes of events are recorded by today's information systems. Nevertheless, organizations have problems extracting value from these data. The goal of process mining is to use event data to extract process-related information, e.g., to automatically discover a process model by observing events recorded by some enterprise system. To show the importance of process mining, this chapter discusses the spectacular growth of event data and links this to the limitations of classical approaches to business process management. To explain the basic concepts, a small example is used. Finally, it is shown that process mining can play an important role in realizing the promises made by contemporary management trends such as SOX and Six Sigma.