Business process discovery from emails, a first step towards business process management in less structured information systems

Overview & Synopsis

Process discovery aims at analysing the execution logs of information systems (IS), used when performing business activities, for discovering business process (BP) knowledge. Significant research works has been conducted in such area. However, they generally assume that these execution logs are of high or of middle level of maturity w.r.t BP discovery. This means that (i) they are composed of structured records while each one captures evidence of one activity execution, and (ii) a part of events’ attributes (e.g. activity name, timestamp) are explicitly included in these records which facilitates their inference. Nevertheless, BP can be entirely or partially performed through less structured IS generating execution logs of low level of maturity. More precisely, emailing systems are widely used as an alternative tool to collaboratively perform BP tasks. Traditional BP discovery techniques could not be applied or at least not directly applied due to the unstructured nature of email logs data. Recently, there have been several initiatives to extend the scope of BP discovery to consider email logs. However, most of them: (i) mostly require human intervention, and (ii) were limited to BP discovery according to its behavioral perspective. In this thesis, we propose to discover BP fragments from email logs w.r.t their functional, data, organizational and behavioral perspectives. We first formalize these perspectives considering emailing systems specifities. We introduce the notion of actors’ contributions towards performing activities to enrich the organizational and the behavioral perspectives. We additionally consider the informational entities manipulated by BP activities to describe the data perspective. To automate their discovery, we introduce a completely unsupervised approach. This approach mainly transforms the unstructured email log into a structured event log before mining it for discovering BP w.r.t multiple perspectives. We introduce in this context several algorithmic solutions for: (i) unsupervised learning activities based on discovering frequent patterns of words from emails, (ii) discovering activity occurrences in emails for capturing event attributes, (iii) discovering speech acts of activity occurrences for recognizing the sender purposes of including activities in emails, (iv) overlapping clustering of activities to discover their manipulated artifacts (i.e. informational entities), and (v) mining sequencing constraints between event types to discover BP behavioral perspective. We validated our approach using emails from the public dataset Enron to show the effectiveness of the obtained results. We publically provide these results to ensure reproducibility in the studied area. We finally show the usefulness of our results for improving BPM through two potential applications: (i) a BP discovery & recommendation tool to be integrated in emailing systems, and (ii) CRM data analysis for mining reasons of users’ satisfaction/non-satisfaction.