What your exhaust tells you that your dashboard can’t

Dashboards show what an organisation has chosen to measure, but operational processes leave behind a much richer trail. This blog explores how process mining uses that evidence to reveal the gap between how work is designed, how it is reported and what actually happens in practice.

Andy Begley

8/18/20261 min read

What your exhaust tells you that your dashboard can’t

(Disclaimer – it’s nothing to do with cars)

In every organisation, each ‘process’ or piece of work leaves a trail as it runs. System logs, emails, workarounds, calls that never made the case file, and the gap between what happened and what was written up afterwards.

Let’s call it operational exhaust. It is produced constantly, by everything… whether anyone examines it or not.

Dashboards show what was selected and measured. Looking at the exhaust though, allows you to test that account against the evidence left behind.

That is why process mining interests me, and why VEKTA process mining platform is so important; instead of asking someone to describe how a process works, you follow the trail case by case, hand-off by hand-off and exception by exception.

It reveals where the described process and the lived process part company.

07875433129

andy@andybegley.co.uk