There's gold in your biz's processes and mining them is the future, says bloke behind topic's first practical guide

Ignoring process mining could leave money on the table or set application upgrades up for failure. A new vendor-neutral book offers guidance from people who walk the talk at BMW, Bayer and Uber. The Register spoke to its editor. Building a business from scratch, internet startups like Uber might be expected to replicate ultra- …

[Pascal Monett]

"[using] analytics and AI on application log data"

Well that sounds interesting and I'm sure that it can help a lot, but only where there is a log. MS Office does not have a log. Outlook does not have a log (Exchange can, but not Outlook). So it looks to me that stuff that is logged concerns mainly networking and servers, not endpoint applications. I'd like to know how the AI statistical analysis machine can help make more efficient processes if it has no log to analyze on what people are doing in their Excel spreadsheets.

Because they are using Excel. A lot.

[Allan George Dyer]

Re: "[using] analytics and AI on application log data"

Pascal Monett - "no log to analyze on what people are doing in their Excel spreadsheets"

Ask the users to log how they use their Excel spreadsheets... in an Excel spreadsheet.

Simple.

[elDog]

Re: "[using] analytics and AI on application log data"

@ Allan George - I hope you were kidding.

A worksheet to log what's in the other worksheets. And another sheet to log the logging.

Shite. I can't even get a decent audit report out of century-old spreadsheets littered with formulae and VBA and thousands of user-crufted changes that break everything else. I think there's a London Whale of a story in there, somewhere.

[Allan George Dyer]

Re: "[using] analytics and AI on application log data"

@elDog - I'm impressed someone was using VBA a hundred years ago... I know spreadsheets predate electronic computing, but event-driven programming?

And yes, I was. I even used this icon ->

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm

They're pointing AI at ERP processes?

Do you want psychopath machines? That's how you breed psychopath's...

[aregross]

Jeez, you'd think this would be Part-and-Parcel for developing a Customer Facing process. I think about when I (as an IT Manager) brought into the company I worked for a new phone system and setup the menuing system to route incoming calls to the various departments/customer service agents. It took 6 months to get it finalized only to find out that most calls went to the Operator (a position we tried to eliminate) because people just hit "0" anyway.

[SVV]

set application upgrades up for failure

Upgrading 60 ERP systems from one version of SAP to the next must be a horrfic project. Personally, I wouldn't make it any more insane by saying "I know, let's do it using AI".