What Is Task Mining?
- September 15, 2022
- 7 minute read
Task mining is an essential component of process intelligence technology. Gartner defines it as the process of capturing employees’ screen recordings, keystrokes, mouse clicks, and data entries – the desktop-level event data, and applying tools such as natural language processing and optical character recognition to interpret the data and generate meaningful insights.
These insights can, in turn, help identify inefficiencies, improve service, and enhance the employee experience.
“Task mining solutions leverage AI/ML models to cleanse and contextualize the captured data to generate process maps, including last-mile variations and provide process and workforce related insights.”
Tech industry analyst firm AIMultiple states that the data generated through task mining can be combined with insights generated from process mining tools for driving continuous process improvement.
How Task Mining Complements Process Mining
A recent survey by Forrester Consulting found that process mining has helped businesses “understand and improve the execution of a complex web of processes that power their company. These include supply chain and customer service processes that function across a vast range of systems, such as Enterprise Resource Planning, Supply Chain Management, Information Technology Service Management, spreadsheets and more.”
Process mining also helps businesses identify issues such as increased cost, decreased efficiency, missed new business opportunities, missed KPIs, loss of revenue, lower customer and employee satisfaction.
Meanwhile, task mining helps combat inefficiencies by logging user actions and metadata to identify task-level automation opportunities. The use of AI/ML models in the task mining process helps organizations contextualize user-generated data and generate process-level and workforce-related insights. Aside from helping automate certain tasks, task mining also provides workforce analytics, identifies bottlenecks, performs root-cause analysis, and can be easily scaled across business units.
Learn More: Understand Task Mining and Process Mining
Why Task Mining is Crucial for Organizations
Here are some of the factors that make task mining an essential tool for organizations embarking on their digital transformation journeys:
Improved compliance & risk management: Due to its data-driven approach, task mining can help business leaders ensure better data governance through enhanced visibility which helps weed out non-compliant tasks and processes and adhere to the risk and regulatory requirements.
Process optimization: Task mining generates valuable insights for business decision-makers, such as task performance, workforce performance, and process deviations, as well as insights into inefficiencies and bottlenecks. These insights can help decision-makers to identify the root cause of inefficiencies, decide which tasks to automate, and take additional steps to optimize legacy processes.
Cost savings: The insights generated via task mining help organizations reduce wasteful expenditure on inefficient processes and improve resource allocation. This, in turn, helps them achieve higher cost savings in the long run.
Enhancing employee experience: The ability to help automate inefficient, repetitive, and manual tasks and to implement efficient software and applications can help save employees plenty of time and energy to devote to further transformational efforts. This, in turn, improves employee engagement, service quality, ROI, and customer satisfaction.
Why Task Mining Has a Bright Future
According to Fortune Business Insights, the process mining software industry was valued at just $627 million in 2021 but has already touched $933.1 million in 2022. In fact, the industry is poised to grow at a CAGR of 49.5% to touch $15,546.4 million by 2029.
The reason for this impressive growth is the quest among organizations worldwide to ensure digital transformation in the workplace. Research by IDC revealed that direct digital transformation investments make up 55% of all ICT investments by the end of 2024.
We have already seen that task mining does not compete with process mining but works in lockstep to help businesses gain additional insight into the effectiveness of processes. Organizations need to determine exactly what kind of insights they need for their long-term digital transformation objectives before choosing a solution that suits their needs the best.
Learn More: What is Process Intelligence?
Soroco ScoutTM: Providing Visibility into the Last Mile of Work
Today, more than 60% of the workday is spent on unstructured interactions in documents, emails, communications, custom applications, websites – outside of ERP, CRM, and other systems of record.Organizations can leverage the same data source to unlock multiple opportunities such as building a map of how their teams get work done, including variations in the last mile, and building a data-based digital transformation program with multiple levers such as automation, targeted user-training, streamlining unnecessary variations of work.At Soroco, we have created a new category of enterprise software that relies on this previously untapped data source — human-computer interactions emanating from daily work. Soroco ScoutTM, powered by the world’s first work graph platform, focuses on enterprise-scale needs serving 1000s of users in each customer. With its privacy-aware data collection with zero IT integration, Scout captures millions of interactions without requiring any changes to your applications. While protecting end-user privacy, flexible PII filtering, and being aligned to GDPR compliance.To get started with Scout, click here