Collaborative process maturing support by mining activity streams

Abstract

Usually, knowledge workers are said to not benefit from business process management (BPM) systems, since their main tasks are weakly structured and not representable by a workflow. However, not all of their tasks are equally weak structured, and with adaptive case management (ACM) solutions, a new category of tools came up to support those processes, even if they are weakly structured. This paper introduces an approach to support the creation of cases for ACM engines by mining activities from an activity stream and suggesting tasks that a knowledge worker can use to create a case. Furthermore, the approach supports maturing of the case towards a workflow by detecting repeating sequences in the execution of tasks and suggesting sub processes for the case which is possible with the case management model and notation (CMMN) together with the business process model and notation (BPMN). To allow for further enhancement of the cases, the ACM solution is extended with social collaboration features, so that people working on the case can comment and rate single tasks. The goal is to show that it is possible to establish ties from social activities and Web 2.0 to ACM and BPM. The presented solution uses a graph database as a basis for activity mining.