Enterprise information systems support and control operational business processes ranging from simple internal back-office processes to complex interorganizational processes. Technologies such as workflow management (WFM), enterprise application integration (EAI), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and web services (WS) typically focus on the realization of IT support rather than monitoring the operational business processes. Process mining aims at extracting information from event logs to capture the business process as it is being executed. In this paper, we put the topic of process mining into context, discuss the main issues around process mining, and finally we introduce the papers in this special issue.