WITS Keynote: Process Mining In Today’s Platforms Economy - Opportunities and Challenges
The 29th Annual Workshop on Information Technologies and Systems (WITS’19) took place in Munich, Germany in the last working week of 2019. On December 20th, prof.dr.ir. Wil van der Aalst gave the Academic Keynote focusing on the interplay between digital platforms and process mining.
The primary enabler for process mining is the increasing digitization of society and business. Tech companies such as Uber, Airbnb, Amazon, Booking, and Alibaba and were able to grow extremely fast due to the digital platforms they provide. Smart homes, production facilities, and energy networks also build on platforms recording the actual behavior or people and machines. All digital platforms have in common that they record event data at an unprecedented level. This allows for all forms of process mining (process discovery, conformance checking, prediction, etc.). Particularly interesting are comparative process mining techniques, i.e., comparing variants of the same process for different groups of customers, periods, locations, etc. However, there are also challenges related to confidentiality and other aspects of responsible data science. In his talk, Wil van der Aalst (“the godfather of process mining”) reflected on the capabilities and limitations of today’s process mining tools and the opportunities and challenges provided by digital platforms.