Mining Resource Profiles from Event Logs

Abstract

In most business processes, several activities need to be executed by human resources and cannot be fully automated. To evaluate resource performance and identify best practices as well as opportunities for improvement, managers need objective information about resource behaviors. Companies often use information systems to support their processes, and these systems record information about process execution in event logs. We present a framework for analyzing and evaluating resource behavior through mining such event logs. The framework provides (1) a method for extracting descriptive information about resource skills, utilization, preferences, productivity, and collaboration patterns; (2) a method for analyzing relationships between different resource behaviors and outcomes; and (3) a method for evaluating the overall resource productivity, tracking its changes over time, and comparing it to the productivity of other resources. To demonstrate the applicability of our framework, we apply it to analyze employee behavior in an Australian company and evaluate its usefulness by a survey among industry managers.