I was thinking the other day about why it is so hard discover how existing business process actually work. Well, to be honest there are lots of reasons - butI think there is one that overshadows the rest - because in most cases discovering how the process actually executes is like detective work - after the fact you need to start interviewing possible participants and piece together the story from a set of connected facts. Slowly over time, just like a detective, the real picture unveils itself and can be understood and analyzed. This is hard, painstaking work - as any CSI aficionado can tell you.
Now what if you had a reliable eye-witness, one that actually saw most of what happened? Well in that case everything changes. CSI wouldn’t be a very interesting show if all they had to do is to walk up to Joe (a trained eye-witness) and asked “Hey Joe, What happened?” - of course that doesn’t completely solve the problem (e.g. understanding motive, filling in any missing pieces not visible to the witness) - but it makes everything much, much easier.
The same is true for process discovery - if you have a faithful eye-witness view of how the process works today - much of the pain in process discovery would be removed. That is what I call in-situ process discovery. I think we’ll start seeing a lot more interest in this type of discovery in the BPM space.