IT service management (ITSM) is undergoing a significant transformation. With developments in AI, automation, advanced analytics, and remote work capabilities, IT leaders face both opportunities and challenges to enhance their service delivery.
Process mining has emerged as a critical technology to help IT organizations through this transition. By providing end-to-end visibility into processes, identifying automation opportunities, and enabling data-driven decision making, process mining empowers ITSM teams to optimize efficiency, reduce costs, and improve customer satisfaction.
In this comprehensive guide, we‘ll explore ten key ways process mining can revolutionize IT service management.
1. Gain Full Transparency into IT Processes
A fundamental challenge for many IT organizations is lack of visibility into their own processes. With siloed systems and data sources, there are often information gaps that make it difficult to understand exactly how services are delivered from end to end.
Process mining automatically stitches together event log data from across disparate systems to create a singular view of process execution. This includes visual process maps showing each step and decision point, metrics on process performance, and the ability to drill down to individual process instances.
With this comprehensive perspective, IT teams gain critical insights to identify broken or inefficient areas of service delivery in incident management, change management, SLA compliance and more. They can also establish an accurate baseline to measure future process improvement initiatives against.
2. Identify Top Automation Opportunities
Automating repetitive, manual tasks is a top priority for IT in order to reduce costs and improve efficiency. However, many IT automation initiatives struggle because teams lack clarity on which processes to target first.
Process mining detects patterns of high-volume, repetitive process executions that are prime candidates for automation. Leading solutions even calculate expected ROI, helping IT managers build the business case and accelerate time-to-value.
By determining automation potential upfront, organizations can significantly de-risk RPA and integration projects. Process mining also continues to provide value after automation by verifying that new solutions are working as intended.
3. Ensure Compliance with SLAs
For managed IT service providers, SLAs and regulatory requirements establish clear metrics and penalties around service quality. However, siloed process data often makes it impossible to determine when or why SLA breaches occur.
Process mining connects data from ticketing systems, monitoring tools, and back-end processes. This singular view, paired with real-time monitoring and alerts, gives unprecedented visibility into SLA performance.
From this vantage point, IT teams can rapidly identify and correct issues to avoid financial penalties and customer churn. This could involve tweaking process steps, reallocating staff, updating knowledge management systems or other targeted improvements.
4. Empower Faster Incident Resolution
Meeting user expectations for incident resolution requires having the right contextual data at your fingertips. However, digging through multiple systems to assemble information is hugely inefficient.
Process mining gives agents an information advantage by automatically compiling and visually mapping related process context around a specific incident. This speeds diagnosis by eliminating tedious data gathering tasks.
Some solutions even suggest similar past incidents that can provide clues for potential solutions. By accelerating mean-time-to-resolution, process mining directly translates into improved user experience.
5. Streamline IT Asset Management
Managing hardware and software assets is riddled with manual efforts that lead to increased costs and risks. Tasks like tallying unused licenses, locating lost devices, and determining maintenance needs depend heavily on error-prone human processes.
Process mining provides a dynamic view of IT configurations, inventory, procurement processes, and utilization rates. This automates large portions of asset tracking and makes the entire landscape transparent for more strategic decision making.
With deep asset visibility, organizations can significantly cut software spending, minimize asset losses, and optimize life cycles to balance cost and performance.
6. Plan Data Center Capacity Intelligently
Forecasting infrastructure capacity needs across private and public cloud environments is incredibly complex. Traditional methods rely on guesstimates that often miss the mark.
By analyzing usage and demand patterns across business processes, process mining solutions can derive incredibly precise capacity projections. What-if modelling helps validate migration plans to right-size workloads across platforms.
With data-backed infrastructure plans in place, enterprises can eliminate overprovisioning costs as well as costly outages caused by exceeded capacities. This enables IT to run a much leaner yet highly resilient environment.
7. Calculate Realistic Cost-Benefit Analysis
Justifying process improvement investments is difficult without a full understanding of current state inefficiencies and their cost impact. IT leaders often struggle to build accurate ROI projections.
Process mining lets users assign cost factors to process steps, delays, deviations, and other measurable attributes. The solution then calculates hard savings values across the entire process landscape.
This quantifiable view of improvement potential enables data-backed decision making during planning and continued objective progress tracking post-implementation.
8. Balance Innovation Spend Against Business Value
In response to digital disruption, IT departments often feel pressured to rush new innovations into production based on vendor hype cycles rather than real user need.
Process mining helps correct this imbalance by spotlighting how users actually interact with systems and where they struggle most. By tying spending directly to genuine user demand, IT can zero in on high-impact projects rather than wasting resources.
Ongoing process analytics further help determine if new solutions are delivering expected adoption and outcomes after launch. This evidence-based approach cuts wasteful spending and aligns innovation closer to business value.
9. Enable Seamless Audits and Compliance
Maintaining rigorous internal controls and preparing for external audits like SOX typically requires enormous manual effort from IT systems and process experts. This diverts key staff from critical activities to answer auditor questions.
With detailed visibility into systems and processes, process mining eliminates disclosure gaps that lead to audit failures. Automated process documentation also minimizes manual interference to get audit-ready.
Some solutions can even suggest specific risks based on process patterns that typically draw auditor attention during prior examinations. By simplifying audit prep, IT can redirect months of wasted productivity.
10. Continually Advance IT Maturity
Becoming a proactive, data-driven IT organization requires a culture shift as well as technology advances. Too often, shiny new solutions fail to align with broader strategic programs.
Process mining fuels continual maturity advancement by making improvement tangible. Quantitative benchmarks demonstrate progress, create accountability, and inspire teams to stretch services and capabilities further.
Equipped with an accurate baseline of current state, IT leadership can set realistic milestones on the roadmap towards higher process excellence, innovation and business alignment.
Global enterprises across all major industries have already discovered immense value leveraging process mining for IT service improvement:
Massive Russian Bank – VTB
- Optimized IT support processes to enable cheaper and faster customer service
Large Indian Conglomerate – Tata
- Identified $3 million in savings, reduced incident resolution time by 62%
Brazilian Cosmetics Giant – Natura
- Cut incident handling costs by 40% and shortened resolution time by 20%
Leading German Automaker – Volkswagen
- Decreased lead time for server requests by 96%, improving productivity
Global British Bank – HSBC
- Reduced change review board evaluation time by 90%, enabling faster innovation
The transformation opportunity for IT service management is vast. As technology continues advancing at lightning speed, process mining represents the next indispensable capability for high-performance IT.
To learn more about process mining applications for IT, explore these additional resources:
