"Am I ready for Process Mining?”
“When should I start using Process Mining?”
I am asked these question or some slight variation of them on a regular basis.
The simple answer is YES and NOW.
My response is always (said with a smile) - “How soon is too soon to know you have an opportunity to improve?” or a more glass half empty response - “How soon is too soon to know you have a problem?”
The initial questions are usually asked from one of two perspectives and sometimes both:
- A maturity perspective
- A data perspective
Let us tackle both.
From a maturity perspective, Process Mining (formerly known as Process Optimization) can be used at any stage of your ServiceNow journey, whether you are just starting out or have well-established workflows running on the platform for years.
If you think about what Process Mining is designed to do – rapidly identify bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and opportunities for improvement – why wait 6 months when you can start getting visibility into how to make things better in just a couple of days or weeks?
Let’s say you’ve just deployed your first workflow - could be Incident, any sort of request, Customer or HR (Human Resource) cases – wouldn’t it be nice to know that in the first week that 47% of the work was being bounced back and forth from group A to group B and then back to group A or 29% of self-service requests were being returned to someone to provide additional information we could have gathered on the first pass?
We would want to adjust those things as soon as possible.
This type of agility is a huge benefit. We can worry less about getting the process exactly right the first time. We can launch the process and use process mining to constantly improve it over time. This approach results in a faster path to innovation.
From a data perspective, I am often asked “How much data do I need for Process Mining?” or “How much data should I mine?”
The answer to both questions is “A relevant set of data to answer questions about the process we are trying to improve.”
Some processes naturally have higher volumes than others, but regardless of volume all processes can be improved.
There is no minimum data requirement for Process Mining, you could run it on 1 record if you would like. So, for situations where you are rolling out a new process, you could start mining on day 1, but you will get some more useful and relevant information after the first week or two.
On the flip side of that, if you have been running incident management on ServiceNow for 5 years, a relevant set of data would be the last month or the last quarter, no need to mine all 5 years’ worth of incidents. Remember we are trying to make improvements to how the process is performing now, not 5 years ago. If you are interested in longer trend-based analysis, we can use Performance Analytics to help answer those types of questions.
Now that you have the answers to the “when" question, my question to you would be “Why haven’t you started using Process Mining yet?”
What to do next:
Watch a recorded demonstration
Get some common questions answered
Guide to getting started with ServiceNow Process Mining
Get hands on with the free on-demand Now Learning course
Sign up for the Process Mining Academy
See how to create your first visualized process map in minutes
*Process Optimization was renamed to Process Mining in the Vancouver release.
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