Accelerating Business Transformation with Process Mining Centers of Excellence with Maximilian Röglinger, Fraunhofer FIT

Welcome back to the Mining Your Business Podcast. Show all about process mining data science and advanced business analytics. Today's topic, center of excellence. Yaku, we kind of know what that is, right? Kind of. Yeah, here to help us out is Maximilian Reuglinger, a professor and head of digital business at Fraunhova Institute. Joins us on the podcast that they talk about centers of excellence for process mining, why you need one and how to set one up properly to ensure success of your business. [MUSIC] I think smart people in Fraunhova Institute must be doing something really, really well. How else can you Patrick explain their second attendance on our podcast? I mean, after Sebastian Fancels who visited us in our podcast on episode 34, we are about to conduct an interview with his fellow colleague, Professor Maximilian Reuglinger, Vice Chair of the Institute and head of Digital Business at FIT. Maximilian, welcome to our show. Yeah, great for having me. First of all, I always love to say what a pleasure to have you on. Having you here just for me, it just proves how much social media and their powerful algorithms are moving the needle for us, and probably not only for us, because if it were not for linked in my linkedin addiction, I would have not come across your study and that would be a shame, not only for us, but also for our listeners. So we are here today to discuss mainly your white paper called Accelerating Business Transformation with Process Mining Centers of Excellence, which you published in and interestingly, cooperation with Salonis and more specifically with Lars Reinkermeier, also a guest who previously appeared on our show. Well, now the beauty of this episode is that we are recording this before the plant round table in like an official release session, which interestingly will be on 21st of June, where you and Lars are going, I assume, to discuss the paper. And after a day after our episode is going to air. So it's very, very nice. That means two things. First that we are the first one to know. And second for anyone who listens now, they can catch up with whatever they missed in the session. And before we dive into the study, let's first talk about you and your career of it. So my favorite question. How did you end up with Process Mining? - Yeah, yeah. So first of all, thanks for the nice introduction. So I started my career when studying information systems in Bamberg, which is located in the northern part of Bavaria. And you must know, Process Thinking is a very big part of the information systems discipline. Yeah, so it's kind of in my academic DNA. Yes, and when I continued with my PhD, I always was in close contact with industry. And this is also the case today when I'm working not only for the university, but also for the Fraunhofer Association. And I very much like this strong collaboration between academia and industry. And while everything is process, yeah. So this is where digital technology is put in use, is contextualized. So and everything comes up and gets together in the process domain. Yes, and typically when I started my academic career, I had a rather strong perspective on the management part of business process management. And well, you cannot simply ignore process mining today. Yes, we see this in our research. We see this in our projects with industry partners. This is such an interesting topic. And that's why we also founded the Fraunhofer Center of Process Intelligence with Bastien-Fanzelz, for example. And we try to be very active both on the computer science part of process mining, but nonetheless, on the management side of process mining, yes. And this is at least in my opinion, strongly neglected topic, yes, in industry and also in academia. And that's why we are so keen on pushing the boundaries of this specific perspective on process mining. What I found very interesting that you said is that you started with the management and with the proper business background. And slowly, slowly, you adopted this process mining techniques. What specifically does process mining bring so valuable in terms of the management of the business processes? Yeah, so typically, I like to quote a friend of mine, Michael Roseman, also very well-known BPM researcher. And Michael always says that process mining brings us from confidence to evidence, yes. And this is why I very much like to combine process mining and business decision making, yes, because we have to make very complex decisions with very huge impact on the organization or on entire value ecosystems, yes. And in former times, we simply did not have the data. And many of the future-oriented decisions had to be made based on instinct or based on simulations. And process mining provides us with actual real-world data. And this, from my perspective, helps us to make evidence-based decisions, very well-grounded on what is currently really going on, yes. And so in my research group, we try to pursue a thing that we call process mining for management decisions, and we try to bridge this gap. So we are not so much involved in the classical discovery topics, but I think it's important to leverage all the insights we can get for management decision making. So how important is this management perspective in comparison to other disciplines, not just process mining? I mean, there's tons of different industry applications or things that you could implement. How does process mining differ? And why does it need its own little research group to figure out how to give management the tools to really wield it? Yeah. So my perspective, as I already said, is everything is process. So this is where things come together. The resources used, the IT employed, the people engaged. So the process perspective is kind of a glue that ties everything together, yes. And that's why, in my opinion, it needs a special attention. On the one hand, it is particularly complex because so many perspectives have to be merged and joined, in a reasonable manner. And on the other hand, it provides us with in-depth insights into what's currently going on. Yeah, and that's why it's a special topic and deserves a special attention from my perspective. Now, I've seen a lot of research papers on the actual technology of process mining, but not really about the business management part of it. It might just be my own ignorance, but it's just a big field where it's just you and your research group are the sole group that is really discovering this part. Yeah, so definitely, from my perspective, this is a big deal. But I think, so this is typically the way it goes. Yes, so we have an emergent technology, yes. And first of all, the technology is not mature enough in order to be employed beyond the research context or beyond small POCs, small proof-of-concept implementations. And so it's, from my perspective, it's quite natural to start with the technologically focused research in order to advance technology itself. Yes, you cannot talk about the management issues of using process mining if you don't have professional solutions or are only simple algorithms in place. But today, we have, so have a look at all the research that is going on, have a look at the massive movements we can see in the vendor landscape. Yeah, there's so much going on and, hey, fantastic processes are back on the boardroom agenda. This is fantastic from my perspective. And now it's a perfect point in time to shift the focus or to additionally focus on the management things. Because so many companies right now made very nice experiences with the one or the other vendor, the one or the other tool. And so the question is now, how can we scale all this? How can we create true business impact using this technology? And this is where the information systems, the technology, acceptance, the organizational design perspective comes into play. Yeah, and you know, this is what I'm really passionate about. And I think this is necessary now to create the true and long lasting value for companies. Yeah, and I guess it's also the main theme of the paper that you published together with Selon is the Central of Excellence. And it's also, honestly, a big pain point for us and for our projects, because we come to companies, we do implementations, and we have this little sandbox that we are playing with, with a couple of users, and the scaling is always, that's always a challenge. There are different people, different mindset, you know, different level of adoption and maturity. And making things fall into right place at the right time, also like with the maximum, I would say, with the maximum value is difficult and it's challenging. So can you tell us a bit more about, so I guess the reason behind the paper you kind of already said, but what does this paper tell us? So the key objective of this white paper of this study was to get first hand insights into the why, what, and how of process mining sent us of excellence. And the key topic, as you already said, that we wanted to address is to understand how companies already succeeded with setting up a center of excellence. What are the effects, for example, faster realization of business value, creating higher return on investment? How can centers of excellence be set up? Yeah, because you know, I'm quite sure also from your work that there's no companies like another one. Yes, and so the question is, what are the design dimensions? Yeah, of centers of excellence. What are to pick the archetypes? What are road maps to success? Yeah, and yeah, so this is the key outcome of the study. And also here we wanted to move from confidence to evidence. Yeah, we have an total evidence. We from our projects, salonies from their projects. You from your projects. Yeah, but we wanted to get first hand insights from companies that already successfully implemented centers of excellence. To move from anecdotal evidence to true insights. Now, how does a study like this even come about? How does one go from, oh, I kind of want to know how these centers of excellence, if there's some sort of proven metric that we can say that this is the key to success or higher ROI or something like that? How do you go from that idea to actually doing the study? Yeah, so it's like so off. And yeah, so to be honest, I met Lars, Lars Rankemeier, by accident. And we got to know each other at some kind of process mining, expert, roundtable, and then we contacted each other. We are linked in, yeah, so the same social media addiction. Then you have Jakob and then we simply met in Munich at a cafe. And I think we liked each other at first sight. And we also, we share this passion for the organizational dimension of process mining. Yeah, and that's basically that's it. And a couple of weeks later, we sat together, had the project kick off and kicked off the study, yeah. Yeah, to be fair, Lars is very likeable. So no surprise there. So you basically had this idea to kick off this study. And then how did you even think about what data, what dimensions to look into? Because you mentioned you want to go from this feelings or just the gut feeling to evidence. How did you design all those data points of success, of things that you wanted to even measure? Yes, so this was a joint effort between Lars Group and my group. And Lars, of course, yeah, brought the substantial salonist experience from setting up centers of excellence to the table. And I, at my research group, we have quite some experiences in researching other organizational phenomena. So for example, a couple of years ago, we studied how to successfully set up HIL IT setups, yes. And so we had quite a good starting point for the dimensions that are relevant, yes. And so we had quite early. We had a big picture of the things we wanted to investigate. And then we iteratively developed the question here, particularly by involving friends of the community from my side, but also customer value managers from the salonist side, yes. So to get an alignment, both from the academic and the industry world, did a pilot study and all the things that you typically do when setting up a research study? What did the study involve? Was it one questionnaire? Did you take it in different points of time? Was there some sort of level of maturity that needed to be done for the centers of excellence before these questions were valid? What did the study actually ask for question? So we focused on salonist customers that already had to have quite some experience with process mining, but that did not necessarily need to have a center of excellence in place, yes. And a center of excellence is a nice little term. But not every company that has a process mining team, for example, thinks of it as a true center of excellence, so the only prerequisite that the companies had to meet was that they have adopted a process mining technology for quite some time, so say six months or 12 months, between six to 12 months. And then in our study, we did a single assessment. So we distributed to quite some customers, and we received valid questionnaires from more than 200 salonist customers, and then we classified the respondents regarding whether they already have a COE, only a process mining team, whether they plan to have a COE. And this was also very important for doing all the data analysis in order to come up with insights. I guess this is also a good time to say a specific definition of COE, and for everyone who doesn't know it, so a center of excellence is a team that has been mandated to provide leadership best practices, technical deployment, support, and training for salonist in your organization. Right. So basically, I would ask the question, why is a COE a must? Yeah. So this was also a very important start, as already said. We focused on the why, what, and how? Like Simon Sinek's Golden Circle. In many cases, a very good structure, also for research projects and for research studies. And I think all of us had quite some good gut instinct, gut feeling that COE is something useful. But as I already said, we wanted to have first-hand experiences and we wanted to listen to the customers, voice to the user's voice. And to be honest, 100% of the customers that answered the questionnaire were convinced that we have a true business value that can be gained from centers of excellence. Yeah, so this is a very general statement and what does this mean in detail? So center of excellence, first of all, increases the probability that you can employ process mining in an economically sensible manner. You can do this faster. So higher probability to succeed, you can do this faster. And you can also see that there are some additional benefits. Like for example, the use cases get better. They get better qualified on the level of automation and impact on the organization and gets better. Yeah, it's truly like an accelerator for implementing process mining in a manner that creates positive business success. So what was really fascinating to me when I read that, that 100% confirmed that the COE is valuable. But you also said that you also had enterprises that don't have a center of excellence. Is that more of a, hey, we probably should have done one and regret it now that we didn't? Or what is the sentiment there? So I cannot be very precise about the sentiment because we didn't talk to the people, yeah. So this is only, this is one of the drawbacks when you do a questionnaire based study. But I think the sentiment there is that even the companies that did not yet implement a center of excellence, they are convinced that this is a good idea. Yeah, because they heard from their fellows, from the community, and there is very much, very positive momentum in the industry because everybody wants to implement a technology to have true impact on the organization. And if you ask to your fellows from other companies, yeah, or yeah, and so on. So I think the sentiment is very positive. And there's much momentum there. Now, actually that leads me to my next question of who was pulled with this questionnaire? 'Cause I'm imagining that if you ask a business user about, hey, would you like a team that dedicates itself to actually building the analyses and building all the dashboards and answers all your questions and gives you trainings and all that, I would be surprised if they didn't say that that was a positive thing. But it's probably from a different perspective, somebody that has the sponsor of the whole thing that has to provide the resources and all these things might have a different opinion of the value of a center of excellence. Yeah, so we approached the guys responsible for process mining in the organization. Yeah, so you probably know that Selonis has quite an elaborate customer value, manager community, yes. And so the good thing about is that you do not simply, yeah, distribute a questionnaire to whomever it may concern. Yes, but there were very close relationships between the people from the Selonis and their customers. And we leveraged this customer value called community at Selonis and to leverage the 101 relationships that exist between Selonis and their customers. And this was also very positive in terms of the response rates. Yeah, so we had very positive feedback. We could also do follow-up calls in case something was not clear. Yeah, so without this, it wouldn't have been possible. So it's simply addressing the same amount of people we are linked in an anonymous manner. It would not have worked out. So this was a true asset for the study. But that's a basic reason also why we joined forces. - I would also recommend to all the readers to download the study. You will find the URL to do that in the description of the episode. And especially reading through the key messages which I think are very interesting where you can see this, the percentages, those are the distribution of what regions and what people were responding and so on. So give it a try, give it a look. I'm not sure you'll like it. One question that comes into my mind here now is how do you differentiate between a center of excellence and an actual project team? Where do you draw a line? And you say, okay, this is already something that we would consider to be a center of excellence. And no, this is just a couple of people doing a project in one domain and they don't really, yeah, they don't count the center of excellence. It's true, these guys. - Yeah, so this is a very valid question. And I think it's very easy to answer in case for those companies that have a high process-mining maturity. So for example, that have connected five-plus processes and involved many departments. So they are you typically also have a high level of we call it institutionalization. Yeah, so something that leaves behind when the project has ended, yes, or when the use case has been implemented. So for the very mature companies, this is easily to be answered. And it is more difficult when you look at those companies that are about to start with process-mining because in the beginning, and I'm also in my, in my Fraunhofer role, I'm also talking to many companies. We still see many companies who are not sure whether to really institutionalize yeah, process-mining capabilities. Yeah, so there are still many companies also around who still have a lack of success stories who still need to convince all the guys in the business and the IT departments. And still many of these companies get stuck in the POC phase, yeah. And I think in these cases, we only have projects. Yeah, and when the project has ended, nothing is left. Yeah, and but then there's this very important tipping point. Yes, where our companies typically make a very clear decision about whether to scale it or not. And if the answer to this question is yes, then you move on from the project to an institutionalized structure, dedicated people, dedicated governance, dedicated roles, things like that. Yeah, and then you have this true institutionalization, which is about to grow when you connect more processes and so on, but then you have the tipping point. And so you've talked a little bit on the study list that's out quite well about what why a center of excellence is really a benefit to your enterprise. And but then I think a lot of businesses then also struggle, okay, we want to do it. But how do we do it? Well, right, what are the pitfalls? How do we not do it? What common mistakes can we avoid in order to have the best foundation to get this up and running? So can you tell us a little bit about what the biggest outcome of the study was in terms of this? Yeah, so I think there are some questions that need to be answered very, very clearly. And as I already said, it may be the case for some companies that process mining just doesn't make sense at the moment. And I'm quite sure that these companies will get back to their technology in one year or two years. So I think we share the opinion that process mining has come to say and then sooner or later every company will use it to some extent. But there are some questions that need a very clear answer. So first of all, as with many things in the business world, the question about sponsorship needs to be answered. Yes, so who is the executive sponsor? Yes, and what is the sponsor by the way? Yeah, the person ideally is senior executive in the organization that is a big fan of the technology and believes in the value that it can generate and leverages their network in order to open the doors, to make the relevant more operational decisions. Yeah, so the executive sponsor is very important, yeah. Then the level of ambition is also very important, yeah. So where shall we start? And what is the value proposition at the beginning? Yeah, so you can do process mining with very different value propositions, yeah. Starting from a pure technology providing a set of excellence to execution, management, excellence ambitions, so this is very different and also has a huge impact on the amount of resources, yeah, resource commitment that you need in order to be successful. And so not only the executive sponsorship, but also the level of ambition and the value of proposition needs to be answered quite clearly, yeah. And I think these are two important things, yeah. And the third important thing is to be quite clear about the people to be involved, yeah. Regarding, for example, who's in the team? Yeah, who will stay in the team? And what is the right balance between make or buy? Yeah, so where do we want to develop capabilities or skills on our own as a company? Where do windows or consultancies have to come in? And yeah, what is the fade-in fade-out model, yeah, for the start? Yeah, yeah. I really want to unpack these points a bit more, but before I do so, I also want to ask you, if there maybe was something missing that you were surprised by that maybe there was a point that wasn't a factor or wasn't as strong as you would probably think it would be. Very good question, yeah. So I think what was not really surprising for somebody who is doing research on this all the time, but I think worth mentioning is that we did not find specific technology related, yeah, factors or hurdles, yeah. And this also matched very well with our basic assumption that technology is mature enough, yeah. And it's not the key problem anymore. So the lack of technological maturity is not a key problem anymore. By the way, not only for a salonist, yeah, but also for many, many, many other windows on the market, but so this was a point of both mentioning and when leveraging this technology, when institutionalizing it, yeah, the biggest success and at the same time failure factor is the human factor, yeah, and this was what all the study was about to be honest. - Going back to humans while the key factor that is in the study is highlighted and proper detailed out is the importance of having an executive sponsor. You already mentioned it, but who is such a person? And also a next question would be because you also lay a term of a business champion. How do these two people actually differ from each other and what is required from each to drive the initiative? - Yeah, so the sponsor typically is a single that it catered personally, as I already said, who believes in process mining, who is convinced that eventually a positive business value can be created by using this technology and who also ideally is a person who disposes of sufficient authority and or resources also in terms of people and budget yet to get the journey started, yeah. And I think this is for many technologies and for many change initiatives and organizations, the executive sponsorship is one of the key topics and this also holds true for process mining. Business champions is another role. Yeah, that is quite important. Business champions is more operational. Yeah, it's located in, can be located in different, yeah, business departments of the organizations and are something like power users. Yeah, so champions spread the word about that technology in their business departments, try to get it operationally going, serve as power users aren't the questions to the evangelization within their local departments and while you typically have one specific, yeah. Executive sponsor, you can have many business champions, you can have a business champion community, yeah, in order to foster knowledge exchange between the departments while you scale. Yeah, and so these are two very important roles of all. And now, I was wondering if you don't have an executive sponsor behind this. Is there still hope for you? Are you saying this is still possible even without this or what can you do? Well, if you don't have one, you should win one. Yeah, so we could see that almost 100% of those customers with a positive return on investment on all the things that go into process mining have an executive sponsor. Yeah, and you know this from your projects, yeah. So I think without an executive sponsor, you can try it. You can do a POC in order to create first success stories in order to win and to convince executive sponsors. But, but I would say without an executive sponsor scaling is not possible, yeah. You're fighting against windmills to use this picture. You could do individual POCs. I think this is possible. Yeah, do it on a very small scale, but in order to successfully leverage the potential of a process mining and any other technology in bigger organizations, you definitely need an executive sponsor. Number two in your list was a highly qualified and especially committed team. And it actually brings me to a question because well, we are still a consulting company that helps the organizations to start things off. And I really liked your point when you said that the center of excellence kind of happens when you start actually getting people into the project like on a full time or like dedicated only to process mining as you finally acknowledge within your organization that this is going to stay. How does consulting fit into this? - So from my perspective, it can accelerate the acceleration. - Yeah. - So, so process mining center of excellence is there to accelerate the adoption of process mining and organizations. - Yes, and consulting comes into play typically in first of all, typically in early phases. Yes, when there's a lack of skills in organizations so also to, yeah, to get the journey started. That's why I said to accelerate the acceleration because typically you start with an individual use case or to use cases and then at the same time or only with little delay, make a positive COE decision and that's why consulting can help establish the center of excellence. Yes, so this is one thing. And then it can also help during the scaling. Yes, because, you know, it's quite hard nowadays for companies to hire skilled employees, yeah, specifically in the area of novel technologies in the area of process mining. Yes, and this can something some temporary engagement until new people could be found, yes? Or until this huge need of resources is not there any longer. - What are the hallmarks for having that successful and highly qualified team? I mean, if you're an executive sponsor and you have a look at your team, what makes you say, yeah, yeah, they can do this. Is it that we need new people? We need to hire specific skills for this or is it something that, you know, people that already work there can kind of do already and kind of transition. - Yes, so I think if you are a big enough company, yes, you can definitely work with existing people, yeah? So when we did the study, we also had a closer look at the competencies and the roles that are necessary for, yeah, making use of process mining for establishing a set of excellence, of course, we have the typical role, more the leadership role, like the COE lead, we need the subject matter experts, yeah, which are typically located in the business departments, yeah, so you definitely have them in place, yeah, yeah. Without any problem. And then there is, there is a switch towards more IT related roles, yeah, so we need data analysts, data engineers, yeah, somebody who takes care of the process mining solution. And I think this is the most difficult part, yes, because when you start, get going with process mining, it is super important to have this IT related or data engineering related roles, because you have to set up new data models, you have to connect the process mining solution with existing IT systems, yes, and to set up all the ETL routines and things like that. So this way, I think the crucial resources at the beginning, yes, are data analysts and data engineers, and then when you, yeah, when you are scaling, it's more important to get grip on the subject matter experts, experts, and we have also seen that the number of subject matter experts that need to be involved increases, yeah, linearly, proportionally, but the number of use cases that you do with the number of processes you connect, while by contrast, there's a huge learning effect when it comes to the data engineers and data analysts. - Now, the second interesting keyword in your number two point is the commitment of your team and the commitment of the people. Now, I love asking this question because it's just a difficult one to answer and to have a general answer for every organization because you were very on point where you said that each organization just works differently, there will be a different dynamics, different way of working. However, how do you get your team committed to the COE, to the process mining idea? Is this maybe also one of the key roles of that executive sponsor who says, okay, this is your job now and this is what you have to do, or are you hoping for this more natural adoption in there? - Yeah, this is a very good question. So I think if an executive sponsor would say, no, this is your job now. I think that there certainly are many people who would do a good or decent job, but I think the most important thing is creating intrinsic motivation. And for me, it depends on the interplay between the COE lead and the executive sponsor. So I think it's the duty of the COE lead to establish a strategic narrative. - Yeah, so what do we want to achieve? What is the benefit for the company? What is the benefit for the customers of the company? Yeah, and I think the key duty of the COE lead when starting a process mining initiative is getting everybody on board, getting everybody motivated, yes. And they're creating this strategic narrative. Yeah? And this is one thing, creating intrinsic motivation. And the second thing is to grant the people dedicated capacity. So this is, I think you already know this from your project. See, when you ask people, "Hey, could you do this on top?" Yeah, on top is not a very good idea when you really try to bring something forward, when you could do a POC with this on top attitude, but you simply cannot scale. Yeah, and we see this. Typically those companies who start with the COE have gained experience with the technology with one, two, three use cases, POCs. And when you really try to adopt the technology at large scale, you need dedicated resources. Not only intrinsically motivated people, but also dedicated capacity, because a lack of capacity, each intrinsic motivation for breakfast, yeah, and this will only be a temporary phenomenon, yeah, but not long lasting. Yeah, I love the splits whenever we, or very often when we work someone. So the new person who's in the project, they split the responsibilities, they will now be 50% dedicated to their all the work and 50% to a new work. What happens is that they are still 100% committed to their all the work plus 20% to the new work. Yeah, true, true 5050 is not too bad anyway, yes? But as our study showed as well, yeah, you need 100% dedicated resources as well. Yeah, otherwise you won't get impact and you won't really accelerate things. And so speaking of COE team, what does it look like? Who is in it and what persons should be involved? Yeah, so as I already said, there are multiple roles. Yeah, so first of all, and this is a crucial role specifically when you kick the COE off, it's a COE lead, yeah, who is responsible for creating or the shared vision, strategic narrative, the overall rationale and for motivating people. Yeah, and also for getting together with the executive funds or getting the funding, the resources and so on. And then we have a split between business roles, professional roles and technical roles. Yeah, so on the business side, we have subject matter experts so people who really know the process domain by heart. Yeah. So if you start with in the CFO domain, which is quite a typically starting point for process mining initiatives that can't be available, for example, yeah, a very common starting point. Yeah, so you need experts with accounts payable. Proces, yeah, so you need domain experts. This is very important because otherwise, you only have domain agnostic usage of the technology and this, and yeah, you cannot judge whether solutions are good or bad. So this is very important in the beginning, and as I already said, also very important when you scale, yeah, when you scale to other processes, to other processes domains and move up and down, yeah, the process change. So subject matter experts are the key role on the business part, on the professional part, and on the technology part, you need data analysts, of course, data engineers, because you typically have to create new data models, establish ETL procedures, all the things that we know. Yeah, and also somebody who takes care of the solution, yeah, no matter whether the solution is operated in the cloud, yeah, or on premise, you need somebody, like an IT application owner who takes care of, yeah, of the process mining solution. - Now, is it more that you have all these people in one bunch, or is it that these are also distributed, 'cause we have like the purchase to pay, we have accounts payable, we have the sales department, do they each get their own little people dedicated for them, or is it that it's all just lumped into one big pile? - Yeah, so we could see from our study that almost the two thirds of the respondents have something that we call centralized COE structure, so they have one big COE established in the organization. When you have a look at the big multinationals, yeah, it may also be the case that they have a central COE and then some, yeah, regional or departmental, or, yeah, process as specific smaller decentralized and mini COEs, but two thirds really have a central COE. But, so this is one part of the answer and the other part of the answer is not so easy, yeah, because what is relatively clear is that the data analysts and the data engineers that they are, at least to some extent, located in the COE, it's not so clear when it comes to the subject matter experts, because they typically are hosted in the business departments, yes, and so from our own project experience with the scaling process mining organization, we see that the clear separation of concerns, that the clear division of duties between the COE, the IT department and the business department is rather complex, and it's also company specific, yeah, and when I talk to company and we talk about a set of excellence and talk about scaling, so one of the key questions for me is, so guys, who's the first level support, who's the second level support and who's the third level support, yeah, and please locate us to business department, COE and IT, and you will get very different answers, yes, depending on how friendly revelation between business and IT is, and this can also be very different for different business departments and the same IT department and the same company, yeah, and this is something to handle with care in my experience. - Yeah, so Maximilian, could you give us like some kind of, I would say, recipe on how to get things started, so let's say that you are either at the very beginning, you haven't even extracted your data, or you are already getting some first insights into your first process that you are kind of happy with, but you are struggling with scaling and with rolling this thing out further in your organization. - Yeah, sure. So, I think there are different ways how you can start, so that there is not the one single way to glory, there are different things, and so, I always talk about HI transition or HI rope mapping, so to say, because there is no three year or five year plan to roll out and scale process mining, yes, so you also have to do this step by step and also by continuously refining your process mining backlog. Yes, so for me, this is also a very important task of the COE if you have one to continuously update and to continuously review the process mining backlog. And what do I mean by this, yeah? So, you're typically, when you leverage a technology like process mining, you have two things to do at the same time. First of all, you have to create operational success as fast as possible, in order to ensure that the funding and the resourcing is continued, yeah? You cannot simply take one or two years to have the first success story, yeah? So, you have to do this, get very tangible results very fast and create success stories, create momentum. This is indispensable. And at the same time, you have to do something that we call development of dynamic capabilities which means that you have to do this institutionalization. And the thing is that you have to do both things at the same time dynamically intertwined, yeah? Because in my experience, you don't get $1 million or $1 million euros for, yes, lay back with all the operational things, yeah? And simply set up the CUE and then continue creating operational success. So, for me, this is a crucial success factor to smartly interconnect the operational value creation and institutionalization. You have to do this at the same time, yeah? So, this is important and in order to do this, you have to continuously review your process mining factor. But when you start, I think it's good to start with an easy use case, yeah? Don't choose the most complex process when you try to get familiar with the technology, try, yeah, even try to improve a process that is running not too bad, yeah? But where you are quite sure that there's something in it and you can create improvement and positive results because it's very good and important at the beginning, yet to ensure that people have a good feeling with the technology, yeah? So, I would recommend not to start with the most complex process but with a straightforward use case, yeah? And then, yeah, see where you can get from there. - So, what I'm imagining is that once you have the initial steps, the initial foundation, you obviously can't just say, okay, let's hire seven people to run our center of excellence if there's just no need within the business to create it, right? So, they need to have something to do, need to actually have processes to implement, continuously improve things just based on what the users or the business actually needs, right? So, is this more of a question about adoption? Then, or is that more of a, how much funding do we have at the given moment? So, the experience from our study tells us that the center of excellence is also growing with the business need, yeah? So, you can start with a rather small COE. So, when you do the first POC, the first two or three use cases, you don't need a COE, yeah? But once you want to go beyond, you need to institutionalize a COE, but you can start with a very small team, yeah? And then, typically, the COE will grow with a business appetite, yeah? And we see that there's a tipping point when you connect more than five processes when you support more than five departments. So, this is a point of no return, and this is also a point where operating without a COE simply doesn't make sense from a resources and from an economic perspective. Now, what do you say to the executive sponsor? So, what would be executive sponsors when they say, well, I thought I was buying a software, and now I have to rethink how my business runs, I have to all of a sudden dedicate a lot of money to set it up, I have to dedicate now a lot of money to run the center of it, like, I thought I was buying software, what is this? - Yeah, I thought I was buying a black box, we just gonna point me exactly where my process fails. I'm just gonna fix it, one go, and then, let's go. - Yeah, so, you know, I'm from the informational systems discipline, yeah, so, in my opinion, software alone has never resolved the problem so far. Yeah, so it's always about the smart usage of technology and always about taking people along, and to be honest, yeah, and I said this in the beginning, I'm very much addicted to the organizational and to the economic perspective on business process management. This is a simple matter of business case, yeah? So, I know there are people outside who say that you don't need a business case for process mining because it's simply hygiene, yeah, so, but in my experience, when you talk to CXO, yeah, somebody with responsibility for budget, they would love to talk about and know about return on investment, yeah? And for me, it's, yeah, it's a simple business case calculation and you will see if you compare a scenario without a COE and supporting five-plus processes and with a COE, it will become crystal clear that the dominant case is having a COE in place, definitely. I will probably end our episode on a very nice sentence from the study that, you know, you just, you don't just provide a technical platform but try execution, excellence, and transformation. And I think that was actually very well said. So, Maximilian, where can people find you if they are interested in more of your work, where can they go? Yeah, so you can write me an email, drop me an email anytime, yeah, so it's Maximilian dot rü[email protected]. You can also visit our website, yeah, which is fit.fraunover.de and I'm also happy, I'm always happy to talk and as I already said, I'm really passionate about bringing academia and industry together, so feel free to contact me, I'm already looking forward to this. Well, Maximilian, we are up with the time, but once again, thank you for joining us here today. It has been lovely. And yeah, I hope to get to know you also at some point, personally. Yeah, pleasure was on my side, thanks for having me. All right, for you, dear listeners, thank you for being with us. Thank you for listening. I hope that you enjoyed it. Another episode of "Mining Your Business Podcast". We'll be looking forward to, you know, here back from you if you have any questions, any feedback if you are interested in specific topics. Feel free to reach out to us. We are very active on LinkedIn, as you probably already know. You can also send us an email at the "Mining Your Business" podcast at gmail.com. And otherwise, we'll be just looking forward to, have you on in two weeks time. So thank you very much and bye-bye. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)