Forrester (and prior to that, long-time independent) BPM consultant Derek Miers often extolled the virtues of “case management” over “generic BPM” (and it was often commented that TIBCO BPM technologies were well regarded in this area). Yet until recently there seemed to be not much going on in the case management space except for the appearance of a few specialist case management vendors.

Then TIBCO and Cordys presented back in 2008 on “Dynamic Business Activity Modelling” that led indirectly to the current OMG RFP work on the “BPM superset” called “Case Management”. The pertinent TIBCO technologies we presented, over and above conventional BPM, were Conductor (goal-driven processes), CEP (rule and event-based processes), and combinations thereof (goals, rules, CEP, processes) such as in TIBCO AFF. Subsequently it seems that there has been a veritable explosion in interest around case management: for example, Fujitsu’s Keith Senson (chair of the WfMC) has published an acclaimed book on what he and WfMC are calling Adaptive Case Management. Per WfMC and the very popular LinkedIn discussion board on this, the area also covers the idea of social collaborations in “process” development and execution (another hot topic, per advocates such as Sandy Kemsley).

Processes, decisions, rules and event processing, with Inference Rule use cases

At the OMG meeting last week I discussed the nascent OASIS SAF framework with CA’s Paul Lipton, and its possible role in providing a standardised collaborative (a.k.a. “social) community framework for suggesting / organising / developing solutions (a.k.a. “processes”) to problems (e.g. business goals and issues - see BMM) … we will cover more on this idea later. Meanwhile, I offer the interesting observation that (1) SAF is based on the ideas of medical practices (symptoms, prescriptions, etc), and (2) case management’s widest use is probably healthcare (e.g. see the Wikipedia reference). Coincidence?

From the CEP perspective, I presented at OMG and SemTech this week the idea that business processes are just ways of organising events, decisions and actions, and that capabilities like Operational Intelligence are just advanced business processes - and are dynamic and “case oriented” too in many scenarios…

So this week we see the 5th Event Processing Technical Socisty Symposium in Trento, Italy. Trento is a pretty, ancient and university town nestling in the “foothills” of the Dolomites, and is a nice location for EPTS to meet, except that many EPTS members have not made the jouney from the US (Opher reports 45 attendees). Which is a shame, given the agenda.

The keynote covered a unified business modeling approach derived from the OMG Business Motivation Model and mapping from goals and their subsequent intentions via metrics to processes, rules and events. They use constraints (defined using UML OCL) to specify goal constraints, which presumably avoids the need to do any SBVR-type business language translations.

Probably the nearest we have to this in TIBCO today is the Advanced Fulfillment Framework (TIBCO AFF) services offering, in which:

1. Goals (representing desired complex events), such as “car delivered”
   [TIBCO AFF: represented by Plans]
   map to…
2. Processes with activities subjected to goal-derived constraints, such as “delivery time must be less than 7 days from start of the process”
   [TIBCO AFF: plans drive processes selected by or created by rules or manually, and subject to change events and goal modifications ].

John emphasized that the business models had an instance level (instanciation of the model for particular goals and processes etc); of course in a CEP environment one would extend this to monitor resources across processes and thereby also handle resource constraints and SLA policies (e.g. by checking resources before new goal instances are accepted).

One interesting comment was that, out of the box, BMM covered too many primitives to be effective. So the Business Model used just a subset of BMM, the rationale being that BMM’s goal was to support governance whereas this model’s focus was on control (for which only a subset of BMM was necessary). I’m not sure the BMM team will agree entirely with this, but then again, simplicity is good.

John’s final comment was that Event Processing needs to be both top-down and bottom-up (i.e. both goal and event driven) as well as adaptive (both goals and events can change instances of processes).

[Disclosure: TIBCO is a member of the Revision Task Force for OMG BMM...]