Tentina, I., Zerbato, F., Mannhardt, F., & van Dongen, B. F. (2025). Why Do Users Struggle to Get Insights from Process Mining? In J. De Weerdt, J.-R. Rehse, & H. Reijers (Eds.), 2025 7th International Conference on Process Mining, ICPM 2025 Article 11220617 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICPM66919.2025.11220617 (best student paper award)
Abstract
Process mining enables organizations to gain datadriven insights into their business processes. An increasing number of organizations are either launching process mining initiatives or expanding the current scope and areas of application. Despite the growing adoption of process mining among practitioners, several challenges remain, such as the lack of clear value propositions. While recent studies have examined factors influencing value identification, little attention has been given to what affects individual business users in generating insights from process mining. As value creation is driven by the business user of process mining output, it is essential that they are able to make sense and interpret its outputs into actionable insights. In this paper, we present the results of an interview study with process mining business users. Based on the interview data, we derive the factors that influence the use of process mining outputs in order to obtain insights. We report on the factors grouped into three main categories: (1) process mining knowledge, (2) tooling and visualization, and (3) business and domain knowledge. We then discuss practical implications of these factors for practitioners, highlighting both PM output design-related considerations and contextual factors, such as user training and clearly defined analysis goals, that influence how process mining outputs are interpreted and used.