Discovering Business Processes and Activities from Messaging Systems: State-Of-The Art

At the stage of identifying and modelling business processes (BP), traditional methods for collecting business expertise are time consuming since they mainly rely on physical communication. Moreover, there are some BP with no formal documentation and their execution relies on implicit knowledge of workers. Therefore, analyzing the log data generated by messaging systems allowing workers to share such implicit knowledge has been a research area of growing interest. This paper gives an overview of the current state-of-the-art in BP and activity discovery from messaging systems as well as the main existing research questions. Different approaches are presented, discussed and compared against each other on a theoretical level deduced from the defined set of research questions. The resulting overview covers both advantages and disadvantages of current techniques and the research questions that have not been addressed to date. This should provide a solid basis for further research.