Continual Process Improvement Based on ITIL and Process Mining

The inherent quality of business processes and their support through information technology (IT) increasingly plays a significant role in the economic success of an organization. More and more business processes are supported through IT services. In order to provide IT services with the required quality and at minimum costs, the importance of effective and efficient IT service management (ITSM) processes is crucial. In this contribution, the authors present a new approach, which allows the continual process improvement by the interconnection of the ITIL reference model, the 7-step improvement process, and process mining. On the basis of the reference model, to-be processes are set and key indicators are determined. As-is processes and their key indicators derived by process mining are subsequently compared to the to-be processes. This new approach enables the design, control, and improvement of ITIL based customer support processes, which will be trialed in practice.