Organisational mining

Organisational mining is a class of techniques that comes under the field of process mining, used for understanding the relationship between various resources acting in an organisation. An event log is a record of activities being executed, can contain additional information on the resources performing the actions. By extracting knowledge about the actual behaviour of resources participating in business processes from event logs, organisational models can be constructed, which facilitate the analysis of the de facto grouping of human resources relevant to process execution. Sociometry, also referred to as sociography, refers to methods presenting data on interpersonal relationships in graph or matrix form. By analysing the execution pattern of the resources it is possible to mine a social network representing working relations between them.

Social networks

An event log containing the resource attribute along with the timestamp and case ids can be used to analyse and create handover of work matrix. If a resource John executes an activity before another resource Jane, then we can conclude that John is handing over the work to Jane. Handover of work matrix shows the degree of work handover between the resources. Using handover of work matrix and footprint based matrix, it is possible to derive a social network.

Consider an event log with resource attribute:

In this event log, the Resource "Sara" is handing over work to "Pete" 0.33 times on an average. Resource "Mike" is handing over work to "Sean" 1 times on average. Using these numbers, a handover matrix can be constructed that looks as follows.

Using the above matrix, and the footprint matrix created using the event log we can create a social network.