Dynamic BPM vs the role of CEP

February 15, 2011 by 1 Comment
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EbizQ is running a series of articles (first here and second here, curiously classified under “Social BPM“) on “dynamic BPM”, quoting luminaries such as Gartner’s Janelle Hill and Jim Sinur, and Forrester’s Clay Richardson.

In the simplest terms, [dynamic BPM] supports rapid “on the fly” process adjustments. “You can respond to emerging conditions and changing business needs, in some cases without any interruption to IT or without having IT get involved,” explains Jim Sinur…

Dynamic BPM is described as having various levels of complexity:

  • rule/decision-based selection of processes / process paths - see (good old) decision management / rule technology
  • dynamic configuration of parts of processes - usually a variation of the above, with decision rules determining what tasks to do and in which order
  • goal-driven processes – selection of processes and process tasks is entirely based on some mechanism for addressing a route to a goal

So lets look at some of the examples mentioned:

  • railroads using RFID sensors to monitor passing traincars (a.k.a. “sense and respond”)
  • complex algorithms to determine where to deploy troops (normally requiring “situation awareness”)
  • government document tracking (a.k.a. “track and trace”)
  • pharmaceutical and fragrance design process involving ad hoc partner participation (i.e. “social BPM”)

For sure, CEP and event processing is at least a “major contributor” and in reality probably the solution for the “sense and respond” and “track and trace” application areas. And it helps with “situation awareness” in the real-time domain.

What is fascinating is that the term “dynamic BPM” seems to really mean “any type of process that is not associated with simple, fixed task orchestration” – in other words,  “non-BPM” technologies like CEP.  One perspective is that one of the main drivers for processes to be “dynamic” is the ability to respond to change – i.e. events. Indeed, the need is for many business processes to take account of there being larger quantities and higher rates of events that can be deemed important. Another is to use more sophisticated solutions to solve or optimise more complex problems – think of classical planning and scheduling algorithms and predictive analytics, for example.

Probably the “dynamic BPM complexity levels” described in the article can be mapped to the following, based on increasing levels of event-handling capability:

  • pre-defined, late-selected process paths: subprocesses are pre-defined
  • no-predetermined-path processes, where rules or more complex algorithms determine what tasks need to take place – sets of tasks are allocated based on conditions and events: tasks are predefined
  • goal-oriented and semantic processes, where goal states are reached by the dynamic selection of tasks based on current events and situation: tasks may be constructed on-the-fly, and processes and plans changed according to the situation and events.

There are other viewpoints as well – for example, adaptive case management (for non-automated, changeable processes), currently the subject of an OMG standardisation effort. Related to things like goal-driven fulfillment technologies like TIBCO AF and AC. Perhaps we are returning to – dare I say it – knowledge-based processes ?

I leave the final words to a quote:

…according to Gartner Inc: “By 2013, dynamic BPM will be an imperative for companies seeking process efficiencies in increasingly chaotic environments.”

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edBPM really means Dynamic, Agile, Event-driven Business Processing

December 14, 2010 by 7 Comments
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p1010138bI 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!

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Real time processes for business…

July 15, 2010 by Leave a Comment
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Two more links of interest to the event processing community:

A Goal of Greater Agility with BPM: The audience was keen to hear about the inclusion of complex events processing, business rules management, unstructured processes, process snippets and social technologies in the evolving BPM technologies. Japan has been a leader in standard processes for a long time and there is a need to make new and dynamic processes.

I see a continued differentiation in products here: for example, TIBCO AMX BPM is a very strong contender in the “conventional BPM” stakes, whereas the TIBCO BusinessEvents CEP tool us more for extreme performance, exception-riddled, unstructured (a.k.a. non-orchestrated) rule-driven operations… but of course these technologies can work together as needed.

Using BPM to improve auto adjudication for claims validation, routing, eligibility check and payment submission can deliver huge gains.

This time it seems it is not CEP that is being confused (or conflated into) BPM, but business rules and decisions. Claim validation? Rules. Routing? Rules. Eligibility check? Rules. Payment submission? Ah – that could be a business process! And real-time rules are another term for event-driven rules… meaning, again, event processing.

Of course, this is not really “heresy” against the BPM community. The fact is that the term “business process” can be viewed as being much wider than the current BPM community – is not the detection of some event pattern a kind of process? In an agent that is matching events to decisions an event-driven process?


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Gartner, CEP and BPM3.0?

January 27, 2010 by Leave a Comment
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Gartner has published a Press Release containing a list of “Five Business Process Management Predictions for 2010 and Beyond”. These include:

  • By 2012, 20 per cent of customer-facing processes will be knowledge-adaptable and assembled just in time to meet the demands and preferences of each customer, assisted by BPM technologies.
  • By 2013, dynamic BPM will be an imperative for companies seeking process efficiencies in increasingly chaotic environments.

Possibly I am being dim here, but I just can’t see how to map “knowledge-adaptable” and “just-in-time” onto the current process orchestration diagramming (e.g. via BPMN) that is de rigeur in “BPM technology” circa 2010. For sure, TIBCO has BPM customers doing adaptable, event-driven, dynamic processes – but these are also using technologies like goal-driven BPM and state-driven rule-based CEP, assembling or re-using (BPMN or state model) process fragments on the fly. So Gartner reckons that 20% of BPM applications – OK, they let’s assume they mean 20% of new BPM projects – are going to be using such techniques in 2012? Well, they could be right… but its going to need tomorrow’s BPM3.0….

Other predictions were:

  • Through 2014, the act of composition will be a stronger opportunity to deliver value from software than the act of development.
  • By 2014, business process networks (BPNs) will underpin 35 per cent of new multienterprise integration projects.
  • By 2014, 40 per cent of business managers and knowledge workers in Global 2000 enterprises will use comprehensive business process models to support their daily work, up from 6 per cent in 2009.

I can’t really comment on these – composition of business processes is a heavily constrained activity that requires a lot of knowledge of the state of the process and associated cases. As for “business process networks”, Gartner means these are preconfigured solutions or BAM applications – which again are extremely context (state) sensitive. As for use of business processes – well I’m sure many people use processes that started off as a process model today – every time you fill in a time card, log a customer visit, etc… but do you use process models? And how many of those models will be dynamic, rule-driven etc?

  • About Gartner Business Process Management Summit 2010…

These predictions also happened to publicise the Gartner BPM events in the USA and Europe in March 2010… attendees can stop by the TIBCO booth for more info on TIBCO BPM+ … including CEP.

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Gartner on Dynamic BPM

October 7, 2009 by 2 Comments
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Just reading Sandy Kemsley’s reporting on the Gartner BPM conference and in particular Jim Sinur on “dynamic BPM”. From the TIBCO perspective we definitely see “CEP” overlap with “BPM” here – mostly around business automation rather than workflow / general process modeling, although of course workflow events can be complex events too.

Sandy comments: A significant part of [dynamic BPM] is the inclusion of explicit rules within processes, so that scenario-driven rule sets can detect and respond to conditions, even without the process participants having to make those changes themselves… What used to be monolithic lumps of code can be split into several parts, each of which has the potential to be agile.

Reflecting on this, based on experience (i.e. customer production use cases with TIBCO BusinessEvents…)

  1. “Rules within processes” can be achieved though “processes defined as rules” (as well as the more usual practice of forcing the business analyst to separate process and rules via different tooling). Of course, “rules” (e.g. business decisions, event and process rules, etc)  can be themselves be represented in multiple ways: we find the UML State Model (for entity lifecycle modeling) very useful for defining processes and as a (state transition) rule representation.
  2. “Monolithic lumps of code” could be interpreted as “monolithic process diagrams” in a BPM context. The real benefit comes from the model-driven approach: combining multiple models to provide agility and flexibility at the level (business or IT) required. The important thing here is that “one model to rule them all” (e.g. BPMN) doesn’t work …. yet.

TIBCO implements dynamic BPM in a number of ways, though:

  • control workflows via event processing (event-driven BPM)
  • separate processes into automated / dynamic (via event processing – event-based BPA) and manual / workflow (via BPM)
  • Etc.
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