Applications of business process analytics and mining for internal control

Contemporary enterprises have become aware of the need to intensively manage their business processes.1 Process flexibility and efficiency are generally considered important determinants for the ability to achieve operational excellence. However, less-strict information systems that provide high process flexibility implicitly enable the occurrence of process behavior that significantly deviates from a designed model.2 In the ideal situation, this business process model takes into account the applicable legislation, directives and business policies. Business process analytics and mining techniques address the problem that most internal control experts have very limited information about what is actually happening in the business processes. This article aims to introduce business process analytics and mining to the information systems (IS) audit and control community. Focus is placed on discussing the central concepts and on providing useful cases for process analytics and mining in the internal control setting. BUSINESS PROCESS ANALYTICS Business process analytics is a new and promising way of acquiring insights into an enterprise’s business processes. This set of techniques enables the analyst to extract knowledge from previous process behavior, as described in the event logs of process-aware information systems (figure 1). These event logs contain a multitude of information on events that are of importance in the context of the business process supported by the information system (e.g., who performed an activity and when it was performed). In many enterprises, such event logs are already available and conceal an untapped reservoir of knowledge about the way employees and customers conduct everyday business transactions. For example, popular enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, such as SAP and Oracle E-Business Suite, and workflow management systems, such as ARIS, TIBCO and Biztalk, already keep track of these events. Filip Caron is a doctoral researcher in the Department of Decision Sciences and Information Management, Information Systems Group, at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Flanders, Belgium).