This work was motivated by a recent experience where we need to develop enterprise operational reports when the underlying business process is not entirely known, a common situation for large companies with sophisticated IT systems. We learned that instead of relying on human knowledge or business documentation, it is much more reliable to learn the workflow structure from data. In this paper, we developed an algorithm to discover and visualize workflows from audit trail data, and argue that

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... kflow discovery is a prerequisite for rigorous performance analysis. We also carried out a detailed performance analysis based on the discovered workflow using data from a remote technical support center. Among other things, we find that service time fits the profile of a log-mixture distribution. It takes at least two parameters to describe such a distribution, which leads to the proposed method of using two metrics for service time reporting.