Doug Safford from AllState Insurance gave a fascinating overview of a large Insurance IT department’s migration from a high-overhead ($1B pa budget!) mainframe shop to an architecture-driven organisation. This primarily revolved around the introduction of a standard ESB - a business event bus in this case, with a standard middleware solution (TIBCO EMS) with a standard framework (to handle the governance needs of tracking, logging, etc). It also involved much simplification of the IT processes: going from 10 to 2 data centers, for example, and from 15,000 (!!) to just 4 (!!!) AS400-class servers.

Doug mentioned that the enablers for their Business Process Management were frameworks, services, events and rules. Of these:

• Services are carefully managed: they have deployed 4,000+ TIBCO BusinessWorks engines in the service and framework areas!
• Moving to an Event Driven Architecture allowed much more business control of their business events, such as standardised routing and de-duping. The events feed their CEP engines as well as their Data Warehouses for analytics.
• Separation of the business logic / rules was seen as critical in such a regulated industry; they could not afford to have volatile rules replicated in software code around their systems. AllState have standardised on TIBCO BusinessEvents as their rules engine (with 800+ engines today, and the fastest growing tool deployment for them).

In terms of the ROI for their investment, Doug mentioned:

• Marketing campaigns can now be deployed from new in weeks rather than 6-12 months, or from existing campaign templates in days rather than months.
• Rule changes, such as for routing leads to agents, can be done overnight, usually from the BAM reports. In one example they monitored the success rates for agents in closing business, re-routed more leads to them, to gain a 15% increase in closing rates…

I would not be at all surprised to see this AllState IT transformation to be covered in business management books and MBA programs in future!

Nimbus is the new “process discovery” technology in the TIBCO stack. I believe “process discovery” is somewhat understating the Nimbus capabilities: they describe the processes that are then used as real-time guidance (and control) by the “shopfloor workers”. One of the key success stories they talk about is Carphone Warehouse (UK’s Best Buy affiliate, and already a TIBCO CEP user) which resulted in 25+% improvements in customer satisfaction. So in effect, Nimbus can be as transformational to an organization’s manual processes as CEP is to an organizations automated processes. At TUCON we got a good overview of what Nimbus provides.

Of course, one of the interesting topics here is how this very people-focused way of defining business processes (so much so that even a standard notation for analysts like BPMN is usually eschewed) relates to the complex events that a CEP service may provide. I believe the benefits of CEP to Nimbus are as for any other BPM component:

• provide information (as complex events) to support business processes
• invoke (/engage) the workers or actors in the business process
• be invoked on demand to do some particular event processing
• monitor the processing of such business processes (performance monitoring etc)

However, thats just my opinion - the Nimbus guys of course also consider the “Power of Events” for their users…

For another view of the Nimbus session check out Sendy Kemsley’s blog.

Tonight is the start of TUCON 2011 - the TIBCO User Conference - being held at the new Aria Hotel in Las Vegas, NV USA. Publicly unveiled to attendees tonight for the first time was TIBCO ActiveMatrix Decisions - the decision modeling component for TIBCO ActiveMatrix BPM that executes under TIBCO ActiveMatrix SOA. This allows the same Decision Table modelling environment to be shared between those modeling processes as orchestrations / BPMN, and those building rule-driven CEP-based processes.

Congratulations to the AMX Decisions team!

One of the surprising (and for me, interesting) sessions at DEBS 2011 was the edBPM section - where event processing collides with business process management (or business processes, anyway). While much of the BPM world concentrates on workflow-oriented BPM (supported with automated services), there are several interesting areas (or extensions) such as “dynamic BPM” (any type of business process not explicitly pre-defined as an orchestrated process) or “case management” (handling cases with processes as well as plans and rules), through to “adaptive case management” (some superset of the two).

At DEBS, IBM’s Rick Hull presented on “Business Entities with Guard-Stage-Milestone Lifecycles: Managing Entity Interactions with Conditions and Events” (a good attempt at summarising the contents of the paper within the title!). This was directly related to the OMG Case Management standard submission mentioned last month… and amazingly well-aligned with TIBCO’s current deployments of the Advanced Fulfillment Framework (using CEP, BPM and decision management). The only main difference was that IBM had reworked the concept of state models (which is where guard-stage-milestone lifecycles - GSMLs? - come into play) to allow for things like more dynamic state transitions; in reality state models can be extended to handle such requirements but nonetheless UML could well benefit from some attention here.

On reflection, the IBM models presented at DEBS would make ideal extensions to BPMN. Most vendors are no doubt still digesting BPMN2; but do not be surprised if something like TIBCO AFF or IBM GSMLs get absorbed into a future BPMN (notation) standard!

There was an interesting LinkedIn discussion recently on “quick pointers” for starting a CEP strategy for an organisation. I’ve had to re-send this “quick starter” advice to industry colleagues and specialists a few times already, so thought it worth repeating here:

Books

There are 3 main refererences here:

• David Luckham’s “The Power of Events” (2002) - the book that started the CEP revolution / industry / awareness / term (take your pick!)
• Mani Chandy and Roy Schulte’s “Event Processing” (2010) - neat introduction to CEP, EDA and related IT technologies and capabilities
• Opher Etzion and Peter Niblett’s “Event Processing in Action” (2010) - a perspective on the principles of Event Processing

Blogs

On this blog and others there are a number of introductory posts which may be of use. In addition the EPTS have a very useful industry-standardised (but not formally standardised as in ISO) glossary of terms:

• What is CEP (introductory blog posts)
• Questions to ask about a proposed CEP project
  
• CEP project management hints
• A CEP technology check list
• The Event Processing Glossary (per Event Processing Technical Society)
• Alphabet Soup comparisons of CEP technology with others such as BI, BAM, BPM, BPEL, SOA, SQL, MDM, ETL, and Cloud.

White Papers

And lastly, don’t be afraid to check out the marketing materials for the various CEP vendors…