Discovering Implicit Operational Knowledge by Identifying Business Processes that Involve Multiple Organizational Entities

One of the success factors of Business process outsourcing (BPO) is a comprehensive and in-depth understanding of the business processes outsourced. However, such business processes are often undocumented, and discovering them is difficult and time-consuming for BPO service providers. Previously, we introduced an approach for business process discovery that uses swim lanes to recognize that different parts of the process may be performed by different parts of an organization. It generates the business process from an event log and user information extracted from an existing system. Herein, this paper examines whether the approach aids engineers and consultants in the providers who need to investigate business processes of organizations (i.e., their customers on which they do not have sufficient knowledge) discovering the implicit operational knowledge of the target business processes (e.g., undocumented local rules). To do so, we survey an industrial workflow system from which we collected data about 2,000 events and 269 users for a two-year period of the system's operation. We conducted a study on the case by means of document evaluation and expert interviews. The study suggested that the output of the approach is a valuable process visualization for identifying knowledge that is not documented nor recognized by even experts in organizations.