Process variance analysis and configuration in the Public Administration sector

This paper presents a three-layered methodology to contrast variants of services offered by Municipalities with the main aim of improving their business processes re-engineering as well as other significant phases of the software life cycle, such as configuration and maintenance. The methodology makes it possible to detect discrepancies or alignments among services’ variants. It relies on execution logs and applies clustering algorithms to reduce the huge amount of available logs into few clusters of "equivalent" executions. Then variance mining becomes a cornerstone to contrast clusters representatives and enables analysis on the offered services or those a specific Municipality would like to offer. The methodology has been validated on real case studies.