Business Process Workarounds: What Can and Cannot Be Detected by Process Mining

Business process workarounds are specific forms of incompliant behavior, where employees intentionally decide to deviate from the required procedures although they are aware of them. Detecting and understanding the workarounds performed can guide organizations in redesigning and improving their processes and support systems. Existing process mining techniques for compliance checking and diagnosis of incompliant behavior rely on the available information in event logs and emphasize technological capabilities for analyzing this information. It is therefore not certain that all the forms of workaround behavior are addressed. In contrast, the paper builds on a list of generic types of workarounds found in practice, and explores whether and how they can be detected by process mining techniques. Results obtained for four workaround types in five real-life processes are reported. The remaining two types are not reflected in events logs and cannot be detected by process mining.