I can’t say I’m a huge fan of the term “edBPM” as all managed business processes rely on events – it’s a bit like saying “flexible agile development”… However the goal is worthy enough, as it is to convey the use of event processing technology in automated business processes. For this reason I am also not a fan of the “Management” part in “edBPM” – pureplay BPM systems like TIBCO AMX BPM provide management of (human-oriented) business processes, whilst automated business processes have different, simpler, “management” needs. A more accurate term might be CEP-based Business Processing, using things like inference-driven business processes with integrated decisioning and business monitoring… but this begs the question “how is this different from complex event processing” with an emphasis on the “processing”, not merely the detection of “complex events”.
This week Rainer von Ammon hosted edBPM2010 as a workshop at the ServiceWave2010 conference, which had the theme of Ubiquitous CEP or U-CEP. This was attended by representatives from a variety of institutions, from a large European telco to a Chinese University. And the variety of interests around U-CEP was fascinating – brain systems, socio-economic organisations and the like – all of which seemed far more interesting than a computer scientist might initially imagine. The “discussion table” I attended focussed on CEP in manufacturing for which the STM use case is an excellent example, and for which the German University of Siegen team described their work with a specialist metal foundry (constructing, for example, aluminium engine blocks for exclusive executive cars). An interesting point here was the fact that German heavy industry was investing in CEP research to remain competitive in a global economy.
Last week was another angle for CEP-based Business Processing – the OMG standards body voted to extend the “Letter Of Interest” in, and hence allow new submitters for, the proposed CMPM (Case Management Process Modelling) standard. At the beginning of this standard TIBCO had presented its plan-based, rule-driven Advanced Fulfillment Framework (AFF, now TIBCO ActiveFulfillment and ActiveCatalog) as a response to an RFI on Dynamic Business Activity Modelling. The increasing current interest in case management and “Adaptive Case Management” is part of the same swell in interest in edBPM / CEP-based Business Processing.
Now, vendors are not really allowed to create pervasive technology acronyms (as competitors naturally insist on inventing competing terms). This is a job best left for the industry analysts (or possibly bodies like EPTS). So far I have not seen much interest from them in the term “edBPM”. And “Complex Event based Business Processing” is probably too close to “CEP” – in more senses than just the words – so “CEBP” is probably not going to fly either. Other related / overlapping / equivalent terms to edBPM have included dynamic BPM and knowledge-driven process modelling, and probably a few others. We shall see what term or terms eventually “stick” for this concept – watch this space!
I see Opher has some more details on the source of the term edBPM – http://epthinking.blogspot.com/2010/12/where-does-edbpm-term-come-from.html – although this doesn’t change my opinion
[Oops this might be a bit redundent given Rainer's comment above, but his comment was delayed... ]
Thanks Paul, as you surely already noticed, Opher and I answered
http://forum.complexevents.com/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=280
http://epthinking.blogspot.com/2010/12/where-does-edbpm-term-come-from.html
I saw the following email from Rainer:
thanks to Florian Springer, we have some pictures from our workshop
(we apologize, if it might look a bit as self promotion…)
Perhaps in some years we’ll know that this was the great, official start point of U-CEP in transdisciplinary domains:-)
We have not submitted an own FET-F CSA as an horizontal action, but we’ll try to continue our ideas and dissemination events next year. Because some of us are already engaged in the submitted CSA’s, we’ll coordinate our ideas with them. Suggestions welcome.
My thanks also to Florian for the write-up…
From Rainer von Ammon…
Happy New Year, Paul.
Perhaps you might already write this according to the author instructions for the ServiceWave proceedings/edBPM/U-CEP workshop which I sent yesterday? Alone or together with other colleagues who attended table-1? http://www.citt-online.com/index.php?id=veranstaltungen&id3=gent2010&id4=more respectively the accordant to the docu there http://www.citt-online.com/downloads/Docu-Workshop-edBPM-UCEP.pdf
Hi Rainer (moved your comment to the edBPM post comment): yes I’d forgotten I need to clean up some of my contributions in the Workshop doc – thanks for the reminder! And Happy New Year too!
Cheers
edBPM as a term was allegedly introduced by Gartner some time after our CEP symposion 2006 and our CEP/BPM/BAM panel there at Hawthorne/NY as far as Opher told me when I was asked 2007 to define a bit the term for the Springer Encyclopedia Database Systems http://www.springer.com/computer/database+management+&+information+retrieval/book/978-0-387-49616-0.
Actually edBPM means two different platforms, BPM and CEP, which run in parallel whereby a concert of collaborating processes is managed by the real-time analysis of an event cloud or event streams and where another event as a result of this Complex Event Processing may be generated and be inserted to a process or more processes whose process flow may be dynamically influenced according to a taxonomy which we sketched e.g. in the paper http://www.citt-online.com/downloads/62750370.pdf. My 2 cents:-)
This is quite more complex than to model and manage a single business process, even between different partners and enterprises on the basis of swimlanes and pools. We also distinguish there between deterministic and non-deterministic approaches for use cases like fraud management where we have to react on so far unknown, but suspicious event patterns which must trigger accordant processes to manage such situations adequately and in near time.
All such challenges are not addressed by BPMN in order to model such use cases and not by BPEL in order to make such use cases executable.
This was actually the job of table-1 at our workshop http://forum.complexevents.com/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=278 because especially regarding U-CEP enhancements we need advanced modelling and execution approaches for complex dynamics for the fields of cell biology, epigenetics, brain research, global disaster or emergency management etc.
Hi Rainer – I hadn’t realised edBPM was a Gartner term – its not one I’ve heard them using recently. The key factor is the business modelling part – which is why BPM is synonymous with BPMN, the modeling notation. And why some customers are using CEP technologies to better model event-oriented business models, usually where they are real-time, dealing with large event rates, and prefer to model aspects like lifecycles (eg state models) over activities (eg human workflow tasks). Of course the approaches are complementary, and used together… see http://www.thetibcoblog.com/2010/03/04/how-does-cep-fit-into-bpm-and-soa-environments/ for example.
Thanks for a good edBPM2010 event, by the way!
Cheers