Unveiling Use Cases for Human Resource Mining: A Framework of Past and Future Research

Abstract

Human resources are considered a strategic asset for organizations and play a key role in the execution of business processes. Hence, organizations should provide an environment that enables them to operate in an effective and efficient manner. To shape such an environment, an improved understanding and monitoring of the real-life involvement of human resources in processes and the teams in which they operate would be beneficial. Using event data from information systems, process mining can play a role in this respect. Over the years, several human resource mining methods have been developed, i.e., process mining methods that convey insights related to the human resources in a process using an event log. However, there is a lack of a holistic understanding of the breadth of these methods. Against this backdrop, the paper uses a systematic literature review to develop a framework providing an overview of human resource mining use cases. These use cases are classified according to two dimensions: the level of analysis (individual versus multiple human resources) and the focus of analysis (organization-focused versus human-focused). The authors illustrate the versatility of process mining for providing insights into human resources and highlight opportunities for further enriching and extending this area of research to analyze, among other things, how teams of resources can perform better.