The Business Rule Forum folk have just published their flier for submissions for their November conference [*1], and I noticed what seems to be a sly misprint (or a slight dig at the technology-focused Complex Event Processing community) in their call for customer case studies:
We also invite your presentation on one or more of these Special Focus Areas …
Business Rules, Decisioning and …
o Complex Event Management (CEP)
…
Most CEP tools claim some level of business ownership of the CEP process (for example, in TIBCO BusinessEvents we provide a decision management application together with a means of specifying decisions as decision tables). However, for the most part the simple events used by the application are read from some event bus or other event source: in other words, they are defined (and maybe managed) externally. The abstract events being defined and interpreted by the CEP system are “managed” only in that the CEP tool may provide the associated state model, event flow or rules (in the appropriate event processing element) to define the abstract event, and these programming elements may possibly be controlled in a SCM system. Internal events and timer events are also defined inside the CEP application.
Is there a case for business-level or SCM-style management of events? Some end-user organizations believe so: a large credit card organization complained to me once that there was insufficient control over (and re-use in) message bus products, as they allowed developers unconstrained abilities to create overlapping message / event types in an organization requiring costly message/event bridges between applications [*2]. Perhaps the equivalent of MDM for messaging is required [*3] – I prefer “Master Event Management” or MEM over “Complex Event Management”. Would the business like to control the lifecycle and useage of their business messages or events, and maintain them in a Business User Interface? The latter would then tie in with CEP products, as various abstract events could then be published to the business’ Event Management system as potential external events for possible consumption by other systems (such as CEP-based BAM applications working across event-based applications…). It could also tie in with Governance and Business Policy / rule management…
Just a thought…
Notes:
[1] Disclosure: TIBCO presented at the last year’s conference on Complex Event Processing…
[2] Of course, one could say that unconstrained development of messages is an internal IT control issue…
[3] Disclaimer: TIBCO CIM is an MDM product developed in the same group as the TIBCO BusinessEvents CEP product. Typically master data may be referenced in complex event processing, or master data change events may be useful input events for a CEP application.
Is there a case for business-level or SCM-style management of events?
I believe there is as much a case for business understanding of business events as there is for processes… and BPM is one of the major success stories in bringing business and IT together in recent years.
Consider the following definitions that should be of interest to business managers (ie outside of pure IT):
- we consider a customer defection to be defined by the events E or event patterns P, and indicated previously by the events Ep or event patterns Pp
- a fraud event is defined as the events E or event patterns P, and indicated previously by the events Ep or event patterns Pp
etc
The main problem in the past is that business folk have not had much ROI on defining terms (for shelfware dictionaries, and occasionally IT requirements). However, specifying and maintaining such terms that can be nearly directly implemented / mapped using CEP technology is win-win for business managers and IT folk. To date, then benefits have been mostly taken in creating innovative solutions for interesting problems, not giving control to business folks. Consider the latter an “imminent next stage” in CEP evolution!
Cheers