An increasing numbers of companies are becoming keenly interested in process mining. For example, the main track of the recent “International Conference on Process Mining (ICPM 2020)” had almost 2000 registered participants. While it was a virtual event due to Covid 19 – that level of participation is impressive nevertheless.

Why the rapidly growing interest in process mining? Unlike process modeling workshops, where the model is largely based on people’s perception of how work is done, process mining is data based. It extracts insights from processes by the means of analyzing the event data generated in IT systems. The potential benefits of process mining are principally related to process discovery and conformance checking. In other words, process mining compares data from the event log step-by-step with the process documentation or model to find discrepancies.

Digital transformation was always a 5 year plan that could be put off because it was so painful. But COVID has forced organizations to make dramatic, transformational changes in 5 months or 5 weeks. And the pace of change has not let up as organizations are evolving to stay relevant in very uncertain times.

Never has it been more important that the executives and managers have accurate dashboards and reports to be able to drive business decisions. But are they looking out of the windshield of the car or out of the back window?

Put another way, are the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that they are using to make their decisions leading indicators or lagging indicators? Lagging indicators vs. leading indicators

Some examples of lagging and leading indicators: