Process Mining Applications for Corporate Process Excellence

Today’s private and public organizations live in a dynamic, evolving, and uncertain world that urges them to constantly adapt to generate value and satisfy consumers’ and citizens’ needs. In such a context, governing processes is fundamental: Process Mining (PM) represents a valuable tool to provide organizations with an increased process transparency that supports the decision-making process regarding a variety of organizational choices. Due to its functionalities and potential benefits for improving process performance and the overall organizational results, numerous organizations all over the world have already adopted PM to run their processes more effectively and better satisfy consumers’ needs. However, little emphasis has been devoted to understanding how PM can generate value to different kinds of organizations and end-users: the aim of this Doctoral thesis, structured along four chapters, is to identify the benefits and the challenges deriving from PM adoption and use by public and private organizations and suggest the best way to introduce it, from both an organizational and a managerial perspective. Through a systematic literature review on the PM state-of-the-art and business applications we identified the benefits and the challenges organizations face when using PM, which must be considered at all the stages of PM implementation. We also found that PM has little been applied in the public sector, which led us investigating PM adoption and use in public sector organizations, by administering a survey to civil servants from different public sector areas and by conducting a case study within a specific public sector organization. We first adopted Business Process Management and digital innovation fields of research to investigate PM adoption by public organizations to understand if it can be successfully implemented in the public sector and contribute to undergoing the digital transformation. Then, we employed Information Systems (IS) theory to examine civil servants’ attitude towards using PM, aiming to identify in advance those factors that can be stressed for its successful implementation. Finally, we conducted a case study where PM techniques, supported by in-depth discussions with process experts, have been applied to an Italian Civil Court to identify the critical elements that primarily affect the trials’ duration and suggest the best practices to enable their more efficient execution, reduce their duration and, consequently, create public value. We found out that PM is generally positively perceived by civil servants and that PM can accelerate the digital transformation of public sector organizations, but it is fundamental to clearly communicate its use, benefits, and critical elements to ensure a thorough understanding of this technology and promote a broader acceptance. In addition, our results highlight how innovative tools like PM can revolutionize the judicial system, despite many issues, especially related to the little spread data culture and process-oriented approach, must be adequately dealt with.