In the past decade, Process Mining has not only seen tremendous growth in the academic arena, but also started to establish itself as one of the predominant approaches to improving processes for larger companies of virtually any industry. Process Mining and related services have become a sizeable business - for software vendors, professional service firms, and commercial end user alike.

Such a trajectory naturally spurs substantial investment and advancement; however, it is also typical that – in an attempt to safeguard intellectual property – many new features, products and services
are being shielded off from usage by other players in the ecosystem. Especially when this affects areas that are of concern to all market participants, such silos impede competition, innovation and the pace of further development. In many industries that are heavily reliant on the exchange of something, standardizing terms and conditions of such exchange led to a great leap forward for the entire ecosystem – think containers for global trade, internet protocol for global communication.

Process Mining itself is heavily reliant on the exchange of data, which typically originates from systems that were not designed around this use case and hence requires substantial transformation. Market participants have created different approaches to reduce the effort required for data transformation, but so far no data exchange format has seen enough adoption to be nominated as a de-facto standard. The relevance and magnitude of this bottleneck as one of the predominant effort drivers in process mining projects has been reconfirmed by the Task Force on Process Mining (TFPM).

With the IEEE eXtensible Event Stream (XES) initiated in 2010, academia has established a data exchange format, which fueled tremendous growth in process mining research. Standardizing how academia captures, transfers, loads and interprets event data continues to pay dividends. However, process mining adoption by business entities and the academic progress in the past decade changed the requirements towards an up-to-date standard substantially. The IEEE TFPM hence proposes and invites to co-design the XES successor Object-Centric Event Data (OCED):

• creating more competition and innovation by lowering the market entry barrier
• allowing commercial end users and professional service providers to focus their effort on process improvement and other value creating tasks rather than data transformation
• allowing software vendors to focus on value-adding differentiators, rather than creating the n^th data transformation engine and corresponding development environment
• improving security of investment for commercial end users
• creating a market for source system specific adapter modules translating data into OCED