Mining of ad-hoc business processes with TeamLog

The design of workflows is a complicated task. In those cases where the control flow between activities cannot be modeled in advance but simply occurs during enactment time (run time), we speak of ad-hoc processes. Ad-hoc processes allow for the flexibility needed in real-life business processes. Since ad-hoc processes are highly dynamic, they represent one of the most difficult challenges, both, technically and conceptually. Caramba is one of the few process-aware collaboration systems allowing for ad-hoc processes. Unlike in classical workflow systems, the users are no longer restricted by the system. Therefore, it is interesting to study the actual way people and organizations work. In this paper, we propose process mining techniques and tools to analyze ad-hoc processes. We introduce process mining, discuss the concept of mining in the context of ad-hoc processes, and demonstrate a concrete application of the concept using Caramba, process mining tools such as EMiT and MinSoN, and a newly developed extraction tool named Teamlog.