Social network analysis of the common agricultural policy (CAP) funding administration: A process mining approach

Abstract

The European Union (EU) provides a high amount of its budget for the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Overall, the distribution of the funding adheres to several regulations derived either from EU or from Member States laws, while various departments and business roles are involved throughout the process. The analysis of such business processes can take advantage of social network analysis. The research direction of data-driven social network analysis had been primarily identified by various research works as soon as the companies and organizations started to turn out to the adoption of advanced information systems; however, this potential has not been exploited in the last years, and especially from a process mining perspective. In this paper, we apply an integrated process mining and social network analysis approach in order to extract the optimal process models and the social network of the entities involved in the process aiming at tackling with the complexity of the CAP funding process and providing useful insights from an organizational perspective. To do this, we apply a methodology that consists of four steps: (i) import event log and exploratory data analysis; (ii) process discovery; (iii) conformance checking and evaluation; and, (iv) social network analysis. The results show that the proposed approach can reveal insights that are not visible due to the complexity of such processes.