This past weekend two of my favorite things collided. My daughters were part of a school spirit event, and it was Star Wars themed. My mind started to wander to one my other favorite things, ServiceNow’s Process Mining solution, and this blog post was born.
If you've seen Return of the Jedi, you know the climactic battle isn't one mission. It's three running simultaneously: Han's team on Endor fighting to destroy the shield generator, Lando leading the Rebel fleet against the Imperial armada, and Luke facing Vader and the Emperor aboard the Death Star itself.
Each mission has its own path. Its own obstacles. And its own way of derailing everything else.
Han's team gets ambushed. The shield stays up. The X-wings are temporarily turned away. Lando's fleet absorbs punishment it was never supposed to take. One snag in one thread cascades across all the others.
The Rebels didn't win because any single mission went perfectly. They won because all the threads eventually came together. But imagine trying to understand what happened or what nearly went wrong by only reviewing one mission. You'd never see the full picture.
For many organizations, that's exactly where process mining is today. And there's a powerful next step.
One Thread at a Time
Traditional process mining is powerful. Trace a case, an incident ticket, a purchase order, a service request from start to finish and find the bottlenecks. A genuine leap forward from flying blind. And for many processes, it's exactly what is needed.
But some processes don't move in one thread. And when they don't, one thread isn't enough.
Academics have been working on this problem for years. The formal concept is called object-centric process mining (OCPM) pioneered by researchers who recognized that many real business processes involve multiple interrelated objects moving simultaneously, not a single case flowing cleanly from point A to B. The breakthrough was recognizing that those relationships are often one-to-many. Think about a simple IT service request. The moment it's submitted it spawns multiple tasks - access provisioning, asset assignment, software fulfillment. Each routed to a different team, each moving at its own pace. Traditional process mining picks one of those threads and follows it. It has no way to show you how they interact, or how a delay in asset assignment quietly holds up everything else downstream.
ServiceNow Process Mining takes that academic foundation and puts it to work through multidimensional process maps. These maps track all of those objects simultaneously and show you where they collide and where the connections are that a single-object view wouldn't expose. And it goes beyond just tracking events. Approvals, assignment groups, and other contextual dimensions can be surfaced directly on the map so you're not just seeing where the process slowed down, you're seeing who was holding it, where the decision stalled, and which team needs a different way of working.
Sample multidimensional map showing a requested item that has two separate tasks and an approval.
Here's what that looks like across the platform.
IT Service Management
A critical application goes down. The incident team investigates. Change management checks for a recent cause. Problem management looks for a known workaround. Multiple threads, all running at once.
A single-object map gives you the incident story. The multidimensional view gives you the full picture. Incomplete change records created ambiguity about root cause, which delayed the workaround, which extended the outage far longer than it needed to run. The bottleneck wasn’t in the incident. It was in a completely different object, visible only when you look at all the threads together.
Sample incident management process with both the linked change process and problem process.
Sales & Order Management
A promising lead converts to an opportunity. The opportunity generates a quote. The quote, once approved, triggers an order. Four objects, each handed off to different teams, each with their own process running in parallel.
A single-object map might show you the order was late. But the multidimensional view reveals the quote sat in an approval queue for four days because the approver was never notified. A breakdown in a completely different object that had nothing to do with the order itself. By the time anyone saw the problem, the customer had already gone cold.
Sample sales and order management process linking leads, opportunities, quotes, and orders.
HR Onboarding
An onboarding request spawns a provisioning workflow, a hardware order, a facilities request, and a manager approval all simultaneously. Each thread looked acceptable in isolation. But a vendor delay knocked hardware off track, provisioning got skipped, and the employee arrived on day one with no laptop and no access. The multidimensional view shows you exactly where it broke down and what to fix so it doesn't happen again.
Sample HR onboarding process map
See All the Threads
Here's the irony of the Battle of Endor. The Emperor actually could see all three threads, using the Force (of course). He just chose to focus on Luke. He was so certain that thread was the one that mattered and the others were under control that he never paid attention to them after a certain point.
The capability to see everything is only as powerful as your willingness to look.
ServiceNow Process Mining's multidimensional process maps give you the full picture. Every object, every thread, every dependency - so you can understand not just where your processes broke down, but why, and what to change going forward.
"Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view."
— Obi-Wan Kenobi, Return of the Jedi
Learn more about creating Multidimensional Process Maps in this Process Mining Academy session.
Resources to continue your Process Mining journey:
- Guide to Getting Started with ServiceNow Process Mining
- Process Mining Use Case Series
- Get started today in your production instance with Process Mining Evaluation Projects
- How to create your first Process Mining project in minutes
- How Process Mining aligns to your AI initiatives
- How to Identify Process Improvement Opportunities
