The European Football Championship is just around the corner. These days, more time is spent talking about and analyzing the game and players than the matches themselves. Coaches and team staff also make extensive use of data to improve gameplay and prevent mistakes. For example, by analyzing what led to conceding a goal: perhaps the striker lost possession two minutes earlier, causing defenders to be out of position and unable to do their job effectively.
Process Mining
At OnITnow, we do something similar but with a different purpose. Instead of preventing or scoring goals, we aim to improve Service Management. Increasingly, we use process mining for this purpose. It’s a valuable way to apply specialized algorithms to event log data, enabling us to identify trends, patterns, and process details—and make adjustments or implement measures if necessary.
Process mining, for example, is an essential part of our TOPdesk and Xurrent Healthcheck. This tool quickly and effectively evaluates whether your organization is, as we call it, “service-fit.”
Watch the webinar on optimizing and controlling IT processes:
Learn how to use the powerful tool of Process Mining on Xurrent to transform your ITSM processes for greater efficiency, compliance, and improved customer satisfaction.
You can find the slides presented during the webinar [here].
Ping-Ponging Tickets
To achieve this, we extract all data from your Service Management system—automatically and by default.
During the Healthcheck, we analyze this data and generate a report that provides insights into your workflow within your Service Management tool and your organization.
Here are a few examples of situations that could make your organization less “service-fit”:
Skipping Steps: You may have ten seemingly logical process steps, but 90% of requests skip directly from step 1 to step 8.
Dead Ends: Are tickets assigned to teams that never actually handle them?
Ping-Ponging: How often are tickets shuffled back and forth within the organization before any real action is taken?
In Control Through Insight
With process mining, you can quickly uncover these issues.
Since the original data is already automatically collected, you can identify undesirable patterns and their root causes. This enables targeted interventions, leading to overall process improvement.
Moreover, companies using process mining benefit during audits—both internal and external. Auditors typically request a sample of ten random service requests to verify compliance with documented processes.
If you’ve implemented process mining, you no longer need to produce these 10 samples. Instead, you can show auditors—at the push of a button—what percentage of your processes comply with standards and what percentage do not.
This saves significant time during audits because you don’t need to gather data for the ten samples. It also boosts your credibility by demonstrating:
“We are in control because we continuously monitor our processes.”
In this way, process mining is also a valuable tool for proving compliance.
Scoring
By leveraging the vast amount of data available, you can work more effectively on process improvement.
We’ve developed several standard models to analyze and answer the most common customer questions upfront.
The key is that with process mining, you’re not just examining the resolution of the service ticket itself—you’re analyzing the entire preceding process.
This reveals patterns, correlations, and root causes, and ultimately paves the way to solutions. Good Service Management is like preventing goals… so you can focus on scoring your own.
By Stephen-Ley