From analysis to findings: How do process mining analysts discover results?

Process mining involves analyzing event data from business process executions to uncover valuable insights. Although obtaining meaningful results is crucial for any process mining initiative, there is still little understanding of how process analysts derive these insights. In this paper, we fill this gap by characterizing findings of process mining analysis, the processes that lead to these findings, and the role of process mining expertise in guiding these processes. To this end, we leverage empirical data from a study with process mining analysts, including user interactions from process mining tools and inference steps from think-aloud protocols. Our empirical insights provide a comprehensive understanding of how analysts interact with process mining tools, highlighting approaches that lead to valuable findings. The results of our analysis lay the groundwork for the design of tools and visualizations that can support process analysts in their analysis and reasoning processes.