Analytics will be an IT budget priority for CIOs in 2022 says Gartner, process mining will be part of that for many companies

“This year is proving to be one of the noisiest years on record for CIOs,” said John-David Lovelock, distinguished research vice president at Gartner, in a press release. “Geopolitical disruption, inflation, currency fluctuations and supply chain challenges are among the many factors vying for their time and attention, yet contrary to what we saw at the start of 2020, CIOs are accelerating IT investments as they recognize the importance of flexibility and agility in responding to disruption.

“As a result, purchasing and investing preference will be focused in areas including analytics, cloud computing, seamless customer experiences and security.”

Gartner’s 2022 forecast echoes the predictions made by other analytics. In August 2021, IDC predicted that global spending on big data and business analytics would reach $215.7 billion (US) in 2021, an increase of 10.1% over 2020. And, they predicted software to be the fastest growing segment of big data and analytics spending with a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.1%.

"Unlike many other areas of the IT services market, big data and analytics services continued to grow in 2020 as organizations relied on data insights and intelligent automation solutions to survive the COVID-19 pandemic," said Jennifer Hamel, research manager, Analytics and Intelligent Automation Services at IDC, in a press release.

For many organizations, process mining and execution management will be part of their analytics roadmap.

Process mining market to grow by 40-50% in 2022 and beyond

In 2021, Gartner predicted that the process mining market would continue to grow between 40-50% and pass $1 billion (US) in 2022. Polaris Market Research also predicts double-digit annual growth in the process mining software market. According to a February 2022 Polaris report, the process mining market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 49% and be worth $11 billion (US) by 2030.

In their 2019 article, “What Process Mining Is, and Why Companies Should Do It,” for Harvard Business Review, Dr. Tom Davenport and Andrew Spanyi talked about the types of organizations that benefit from process mining.

“If your company uses enterprise systems to support key business processes — and that’s almost every big firm these days — you should be exploring process mining,” wrote Dr. Davenport and Spanyi.

And while at present, process mining and execution management are primarily used by large enterprise companies, the technology will become more prevalent in smaller organizations. That’s what Wil van der Aalst, Chief Scientist at Celonis, told tech industry journalist, Mary Jo Foley on a recent episode of her MJF Chat podcast available on Petri.

"So what you see is that the starting point is typically the bigger companies. So for example Celonis at this point in time has over 2000 customers. And these are typically the larger organizations like airlines, car manufacturers, banks, insurance companies, et cetera. So process mining typically starts there. Because there, if you can save, let’s say 2%, often already, you’re talking about millions of savings,” said van der Aalst.

“But what is interesting is that process mining is becoming more and more the new normal. That you should do that. So in the larger organizations, you can see that first, they were focusing very much on procurement and sales processes, and they started applying it in all other fields. But also see, you can see that it becomes more and more accessible also for smaller companies. So in the end, I think it will for sure not be limited to larger organizations and it will become more and more like the new normal.”