Facilitating Business Process Discovery using Email Analysis

Extracting business process models from stakeholders in large organizations is a very difficult, if not impossible, task. Many obstacles such as tacit knowledge, inaccurate descriptions of processes and miscommunication prevent process engineers from ascertaining what the business processes actually are. Data sources that represent the communications can be a good candidate for facilitating the identification of the business processes. The proposed approach in this research is to find business process related emails, identify email message threads, and finally, tag them using conversation for action theory. The outcome of this method will be process fragment enactment models that can help process engineers both to validate their findings about the business processes, and also to understand better the vague and unclear parts of the processes.