Dumas 2021 — Process Mining 2.0: From Insights to Action (Keynote)

Keynote slides by entities/marlon-dumas delivered at the AI4EPT workshop at PAKDD 2021. Not a peer-reviewed paper — a vision presentation.

Thesis

Process Mining 1.0 stops at insights (a discovered model, annotated with performance). Process Mining 2.0 must close the loop to action — intervention recommendations, causal reasoning about what-if scenarios, and measurable business impact.

Relation to broader literature

The argument is the conceptual predecessor of the Augmented Process Execution paper (sources/2023-chapela-campa-augmented-process-execution) and foreshadows the Recommend enactment role in APM (sources/2026-calvanese-agentic-bpm-manifesto). Sits at the prescriptive end of the descriptive→predictive→prescriptive analytics pyramid.

Siblings in the prescriptive space:

sources/2014-groger-prescriptive-analytics-bpo — Gröger, Schwarz & Mitschang's early rBPO paper (BIS 2014) is the predecessor to Dumas's vision: a concrete architecture (process warehouse + decision-tree prediction + decision-tree recommendation) for prescriptive analytics in BPM, preceding this keynote by 7 years.
sources/2022-kubrak-prescriptive-ppm-slr — Kubrak, Milani, Nolte & Dumas's PrPM SLR (2022) is the formalisation of the field this keynote called for: it catalogues 37 methods along six dimensions and names the research gaps (in-vivo validation, causal policies, terminology).

Philosophical bite

Closing the loop from prediction to action smuggles in a strong causal commitment: the recommended intervention must cause the improved outcome, not merely correlate with it. This is an interventionist claim and carries all the caveats the PHI403 course raises about external validity, mechanism, and individual-vs-population propensities — see sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-causation-in-science.

Connections

Concepts: methods/process-mining-basics · concepts/predictive-process-monitoring · concepts/prescriptive-process-monitoring · concepts/conversational-actionability · concepts/intervention-policy · concepts/interventionist-theory-of-causation · concepts/causation Authors: entities/marlon-dumas Related sources: sources/2014-groger-prescriptive-analytics-bpo · sources/2022-kubrak-prescriptive-ppm-slr