Extraction and analysis social networks from process data

Abstract

Information systems support and ensure the practical running of most critical business processes. There exists or can be reconstructed a record (log) of the process running in the information system with information about the participants and the processed objects for most of the processes. This research was realized in the environment of the enterprise information system SAP. Participants of business processes stand in different relationships. We are interested in the relationships that are not explicitly seen from the process logs, but which are detectable by research methods of social networks and communities in social networks. Our work constructs the social network from the process log in the given context and then it finds communities in this network. Found communities were analyzed using knowledge of the business process and the environment in which the process operates. We found that identified communities have reasonable representation in the actual process, and this opened up a new dimension of knowledge that can be analyzed from the process log. This approach seems to be promising for detailed analysis.