Comments on: Is CEP a subset of BPM?

By: Paul Vincent

Paul Vincent — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 09:44:33 +0000

Interesting comment on the BA vs BPMS discussion on linked in:
http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers=&discussionID=7932497&gid=84758

Rich Weller, VP of Biz Opt at insurers CNA, commented:
A Business Process Management System or Suite (BPMS) provides the functionality to define, design, implement, and manage/monitor one or more sequenced Business Activities, Business Events, Business Objects/Data, Business Rules, Business Roles, and KPI’s.

That is a much bigger overlap with CEP than current BPMS technologies (ie BPMN-based tools) provide, IMHO…

By: Opher Etzion

Opher Etzion — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 14:46:10 +0000

Hi Paul. I don’t see EP technology “merge” with BPM. Event processing may be used in different domains — in the EPTS symposium we also have session that talked about the use of event processing in IT management and in robotics, event processing is a generic technology that has life of its own, but can be embdedded in several different middleware or domain oriented framework. I certainly see event processing (in some way or another) becomes a standard part of BPM suites, as well as other suites.

By: Paul Vincent

Paul Vincent — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 07:14:20 +0000

Hi Scott - fully agree - CEP technology is complementary to BPM (and SOA) technology, helping solve business problems. However, many pundits feel “BPM” is everything to do with business processes - hence in that view, everything in IT is pretty much (subsidiary to or a subset of) “wider BPM”.

On SLAs vs rules: yes, rules can be defined against the process entity (eg the time constraint) and against the combination of processes (eg departmental performance level, performance level of people in location Y, etc etc). And indeed, translating a SLA constraint into decision rules is an interesting mapping: I want to find out when I’ve broken the SLA, but sometimes I want a warning of how close I am to breaching it, etc.

Cheers

By: Scott Francis

Scott Francis — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 05:13:28 +0000

I can’t understand saying CEP is a “subset” of BPM. This is sort of like the “is BPM part of SOA or SOA part of BPM?” arguments I often see. I think they’re two different technologies that have some incidental overlap and which have mostly complementary usage - your organization will likely be better off if you have both a CEP capability and a BPM capability and SOME of your projects/processes will leverage both capabilities…

One note on SLAs: sometimes these are singular ( a loan must be processed in 30 days) and sometimes aggregate (we have to be on-time 80% of the time), and sometimes a combination. So, when you say SLA’s are addressed by rules it depends on what kind of rules are employed, and what kinds of consequences should be employed when an SLA is violated or in danger of being violated.

Great summation of the points, Paul -
Scott