Process Mining Organization Email Data and National Security Implications

Abstract

Many think of processes as sequential, deliberate activities which sustain businesses and government agencies; employees integrate themselves into defined organizational processes. From an ecosystem vantage, however, emergent processes exist and are discoverable. Emergent ecosystems form without human intention and may be especially influenceable. If emergent organizational processes–especially critical infrastructure processes–were explicit, they may be exploited. Tremendous intelligence is contained within semi-structured and unstructured organizational data sources. Properly analyzed, these data provide government and private organizations with actionable management and risk mitigation insights. Using explainable process technologies combined with natural language processing, a private critical infrastructure participant’s organizational process model is discovered from semi-structured email data. Data derived from the process model are presented which elucidate internal operations and contribute to automated situational awareness of dynamically evolving events. National security implications and future research needs are described.KeywordsProcess miningInformation warfareCritical infrastructureOrganization modelling