Social Network Analysis for Business Process Discovery

The organizational perspective of Process Mining is a valuable technique that allows knowing the social network of an organization. To do so, it provides means to make an evaluation of networks by mapping and analyzing relationships among people, teams, departments or even entire organizations. There are many tools available in the market for social network analysis. However, for a long time the main focus was on developing advanced techniques for deriving a flat model and analyzing relationships at the individual level. Whereas the study at a higher level, which allows us to study the communities that exist inside an organization and how they are connected; has been neglected. Only recently, has a considerable effort been made in algorithms for finding communities in networks. In this work we present an approach that aims at finding communities inside a social network. Our approach is based in two main ideas: a Hierarchical Agglomerative Clustering Algorithm and Modularity concept. The last concept indicates which iteration of the clustering algorithm is the best. The approach was implemented in the ProM framework and we demonstrate its applicability analyzing the log files of an Emergency Department from a medium size Portuguese Hospital.