I was going to blog on the presentations at the Decision Modeling Information Day at OMG, but suffice to say that James Taylor has already done a great job of this so I will just add a few comments from the CEP perspective…

1. CEP can be viewed just as “complex event” detection… but increasingly businesses want “complex  event” *processing*, where processing is not just event detection but also decision and reaction. Of course, the reaction can be a traditional orchestrated business process, as in a pattern like:

(a) detect fraud event (b) decide appropriate action (c) react with the Fraud Handling business process

2. Business modeling of decisions, as well as complex events, is an area that none of the traditional business modeling tools seem to be taking seriously. Yet both decision automation and CEP provide huge values to business operations.

3. Methodologists on the decision modeling side are finding receptive audiences in business. These include the KPI Decision Model, which was endorsed by Mark Pettit from Freddie Mac at the info day, the new BRS Question-Charts, and Alan Fish’s DRA. Adapting these for real-time, event-based decisions should be possible, as Larry Goldberg from KPI discussed in the meeting: the main difference with top-down analysis of decisions is that you may or may not be able to detect some of the desired business events!

4. There were some good questions on the role of analytics in, for example, driving CEP-based decisions, or in risk management for trading systems. For example, TIBCO Spotfire Data Miner can be used to generate rules for classification decisions inside a TIBCO BusinessEvents CEP system dealing with high volumes of trading events in a stateful manner.

5. The proposed DMN standard discussed at the end of the Information Day should of course equally apply to decisions in CEP as well as BPM.

Thanks to Vaz Balasingham for an interesting link to an Economist article published last year on “Mining Social Networks” - how big corporations, like telcos, that focus just on “big profit” customers using big data analytics, could well be using a flawed short-term-only strategy. Larger business effects (and hence business profites) can be caused by “big influence” customers - an extreme example of which is something like the Oprah Winfrey Show’s book recommendations. Large numbers of smaller influence groups occur everywhere, and this is of course where “social networks” provide rich sources of information (and possibly opportunities for the marketeers to influence trends…).

The role of CEP in all this is quite simple: the analytics themselves can be data-based or event-based, but the requirement to act (i.e. make an event-driven decision) is a real-time business action. The article mentions:

The trick, then, is to identify such trendsetting subscribers and keep them on board with special discounts and promotions.

Or rather, to make sure they have the attention of your business. And the attention span of the business has to be real-time, not batch-time, so that when a “lose customer” event is predicted the appropriate mitigation is carried out!

Notes:

1. TIBBR, TIBCO’s own social networking technology, can also be a source of data for analytics. In particular, text-based analytics such as those provided by Netrics might be useful to indicate trends…

2. The article also had a very prescient quote: …societies with longstanding and strong social and business ties abroad weather change well. In relatively closed countries, like Egypt, rapid shifts in social networks can trigger upheaval…

TIBCO has a virtual booth at the MWD Advisors Process Intelligence virtual event, covering TIBCO ActiveMatrix BPM Spotfire (which might also win the award for the longest product name) - which does visual and predictive analytics on your process information - and TIBCO BusinessEvents (i.e. CEP) - which does real-time event analytics, monitoring, and dynamic process control…

The MWDA webinar (in 2 parts) is quite interesting and worth a look: their model of Process Intelligence is layered in 3 parts:

• strategy level: goals, motivations, metrics
• process level: BPMN, CEP patterns, analytic models
• reaction level: decision rules and analytics

From a TIBCO perspective, ActiveMatrix BPM and ActiveMatrix BPM Spotfire cover the metrics, process models and analytics side, with BusinessEvents covering the real-time metrics, dynamic processes, CEP, event-based analytics and decisions. One interesting possibility is to use the BusinessEvents’ state models for strategic goal planning too.

Meanwhile, the Gartner guys are also pushing the “Business Process Improvement” button, releasing a report threatening doom and gloom for organisations who do not control their processes. They talk about:

• undetected but detectable process errors: this being the case for process monitoring and analytics, presumably. Either that or good old business analysis!
• “context awareness” to rejuvenate commodity processes: context being of course state, or what events tell you!

Note that the MWD event sponsors other than TIBCO (a CEP company) are Progress (also mentioning CEP capabilities) and SoftwareAG (again,  also mentioning CEP capabilities). So it could be an interesting year for BPM-CEP convergence?

There are a number of key indicators of product maturity in decision automation, such as:

• the integration of CEP to Decision Automation (e.g. assigning appropriate decisions to complex event detections or predictions);
• the exploitation of statistical data mining / historic analysis to update decisions being made.

Although there has been no associated fanfare or PR, I see the TIBCO Spotfire team is now demonstrating exporting decision rules (like classification trees for product offerings) from TIBCO Spotfire to TIBCO BusinessEvents. If you have a need for this convergence of data-driven and event-based analytics, drop your local TIBCO rep a line …

Thanks to Brenda Michelson for an interesting post on Data Quality in Real Time that points to a Forrester report by Gene Leganza on The Top 15 Technology Trends EA Should Watch: 2011 To 2013 (from Oct last year and commented also on here).

To quote from Brenda quoting Gene: “The shift from historical to real-time analytics will require that related processes such as data quality services also move to real time.” In practice poor data quality is typically due to manual system inputs - something that technology like TIBCO Netrics can help address at source - or historic information (with previous manual system inputs). Very occasionally it could be due to problems with event sensors. In any such case, real-time events and data can be cleansed during event processing as CEP technologies usually include the necessary filter and transformation rule capabilities.

I haven’t seen Gene’s report yet but for sure, real-time analytics (monitoring, dashboards, rule-based predictions etc) are increasingly augmenting traditional BI (reporting), visual analytics (data exploration) and predictive analytics (data mining) - and such CEP technology is another powerful weapon in the business analysts’ armory in the quest for business optimisation.

Disclaimer: although we usually use the term operational intelligence for the real-time analytic capabilities provided by CEP and associated technologies, others use terms like continuous intelligence, real-time BI, and so on. And today (thanks to a TIBCO customer) I heard another new term - event-driven Business Intelligence or edBI. Which I must admit I rather like!