Gartner at Celosphere 2022: The future of process mining will be autonomous

Gartner Analyst Marc Kerremans said that future use cases for process mining will evolve to focus on execution with sustainability, streaming business events, IT composability and operations orchestration emerging within 2 years to 5 years.  Digital twins of an organization and autonomous business operations will emerge as process mining use cases within a decade. 

Kerremans, speaking at Celosphere 2022, said enterprises are ultimately aiming for autonomic business operations, but that use case is more than a decade away. From 2018 to 2020, process mining has been primarily used for business process improvement and auditing and compliance. Beginning in 2021, use cases shifted more to process automation, digital transformation and IT operations. 

Celonis co-CEO Alex Rinke has said that process mining and execution management will be increasingly used for front-office processes too. Exhibit A could be Emporix CXP, a commerce execution application built on Celonis EMS. 

Also see: 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Process Mining Tools | Press release

Here's a look at Kerremans' expected use cases for process mining by time frame. 

Less than 2 years

Sustainability and ESG. Citing a Gartner survey of decision makers, investment in sustainability initiatives are increasing with 45% of 216 respondents saying they would increase sustainability funding from 10% to 20% or more. 

Gartner's take lines up with what Celonis customers are piloting in the field. Increasingly, supply chain resiliency and sustainability are intertwined. For instance, Aldi Sud's efforts to simplify logistics makes the supply chain more resilient and cost effective and also saves on carbon emissions. 

2 to 5 years

Business operations orchestration. Kerremans said that process orchestration today is focused on isolated processes, objects and resources. Going forward there will be a more holistic MRI view of processes that provides an end-to-end model of the operations. 

According to Kerremans, processes, work objects and resources will be orchestrated. Think execution management. Some examples cited by Kerremans:

• Instead of a task-based view of processes a work object-based approach will appear. 

• Control flows will evolve to business roles and services.

• There will be a complete context of a process. 

• These work objects will be easy to modify with data that won't have to be continually verified. 

• Process orchestration is more operational and goal oriented. 

5 to 10 years

Digital twin of an organization (DTO). A DTO is a model of all the processes within a company running end-to-end. It is also referred to as a process digital twin. 

Kerremans said that DTO will be a use case of process mining that will create a replica of business operations, production and services, customer interactions and the connective processes between them. 

He added that this DTO view of business is more like business mining of a virtual enterprise. In the supply chain context, suppliers and interactions could be mined into an event. Client mining would create events out of customers and interactions. 

The appeal of a DTO use case is that process mining and execution management would run everything end-to-end. This DTO adoption would ultimately bring us closer to autonomous business. 

Autonomous business operations would be a use case emerging in 5 to 10 years, said Kerremans. These autonomous business operations would discover patterns, interpret, analyze and define scenarios and then act. 

An autonomous business operation would have more resilience and adjust on the fly based on goals. Kerremans said these resilient operations would combine operations modeling and analysis, monitoring and execution. Think programmable businesses.

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief (former)

Larry Dignan is the former Editor in Chief of Celonis Media. Before joining Celonis, he was Editor in Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in WallStreetWeek.com, Inter@ctive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning magazine.