IDC’s Stephen Hendrick presented on Decision Management at BBC2011, and (of course!) commented that the future of business rule tooling was likely to be sense and respond (CEP) event processing capabilities. Stephen also presented an IDC model on social / collaborative development - something also touched upon by Paul Haley in his talks on the future of  “knowledge management” in the BBC2011 and RulesFest conferences.

As TIBCO is also a major provider of social media technology (tibbr), it is worth maybe suggesting what “collaboration” might mean in terms of operational systems.

• Social collaboration starts with text, not images / diagrams (/voice / video)

Although it is possible to display / allow constrained edits  to / verify / validate visual models like BPMN, state models and so on, these don’t fit too neatly on the average smartphone that is the base platform for social media. So one is more likely to collaborate against a textual representation of such models, but more often than not that textual model will look like… a ruleset.

• Representing text forms on social media like tibbr is easy

Displaying a rule editor in a chat session is not difficult. Collaboration models could also involve adding refactoring tools to allow rules to be split, joined, extended, subclassed etc. But at some point you need a specialist editor in your chat session - if only to keep track of the suggested changes / evolution. IDC’s model also adds more user roles that will need specialist controls too, like the discussion “leader”, “guider”, “critic” etc.

While some such collaboratively-developed rulesets might be considered as overly complex for social-media development, there are certainly areas that could benefit from this form of interactive development: consider specifying complex event definitions using an event pattern language. Or providing examples for a non-discrete event pattern mechanism like Netrics (now TIBCO Patterns) to learn from. This could be very interesting for certain industries to explore!

Note: this session also blogged about here.

As is now “tradition”, the Business Rules Forum / Building Business Capability conference followed RulesFest (from last week), each covering the opposite side of the rules spectrum in terms of audience (analysts versus rules programmers), size (~1000 vs ~120), and even location (California vs Florida). It’s an interesting fracturing of the “decision and rules community”, which actually makes sense (i.e. business vs IT) - and both deserve to grow next year (RulesFest should be 2x-3x in size, BBC could probably easily grow 30%).

One of the interesting trends here at BBC2011 is the growth of the business analyst focus, which of course means “rules engine vendors” make much less sense to be seen here versus “rules management” or even MDM vendors, and those less so than the business modelling community. In the CEP space, vendors tend to cover both business and IT camps: for example TIBCO BusinessEvents includes event / concept modeling, state modeling and decision modeling, but for automation not business documentation. And both IBM and Red Hat have business user interfaces with event processing (with a rumor of a 4th CEP vendor about to buy their way into the decision management space).

So the main focus for business analysts attending BBC were very much at the TIBCO Nimbus level of process documenting / discovery (and indeed, decision documenting / discovery). And the surprise was the lack of business modeling tools (with the notable exception of Sparx systems - folks known from the UML world). Maybe this will change next year?

TIBCO Software exhibited this year too (with the aforementioned TIBCO Nimbus as well as ActiveMatrix BPM), and we contributed to 2 sessions (”The OMG Decision Model and Notation standard” co-presented with IBM, and “What Analysts need to understand about Business Events“). The latter was interesting to present, as events participate in many analyst models: I’ll post a precis of this session later.

It’s that time of year again - next week is the RulesFest conference (W coast USA), followed by the Business Rules Forum conference and RuleML workshop (co-hosted on the E coast USA). From a CEP perspective we have:

• RulesFest: a good selection of sessions on CEP-related matters, such as:
  • EBay’s Kenny Shi on a real-time decision platform and decisions as asssets.
  • IBM’s Daniel Selman on situations, decisions and processes, and probably giving an update on IBM’s efforts to merge their Business Events and Business Rules architectures.
  • Mauricio Salatino of Plug Tree (a Drools consultancy) is talking about rules, processes and CEP based on an emergency services demo.
  • Event Driven Rules and Experiences in CEP courtesy of TIBCO
  • Nate Derbinsky from the University of Michigan on scaling of memory for “Reactive Rule-based Agents” using SOAR.
• Business Rules Forum: this is part of the analyst-focused Building Business Capability conference that seemed wildly popular last year.
  • Nathan Bell of Pharmacy OneSource has built his own version of  a “massively parallel expert system” using Drools and Gigaspaces.
  • Paul Haley of Automata is presenting on the Semantics of Events.
  • TIBCO is presenting on what analysts need to know about business events…
  • I see also that EBay’s Kenny Shi is presenting here too, albeit on the economics of decisioning rather than real-time decisions.
• RuleML: this is the more technical part of the week versus BR Forum:
  • A keynote on Event-driven Rules: Experiences in CEP (from TIBCO)
  • Standards for Complex Event Processing and Reaction Rules by Adrian Paschke, Paul Vincent, Florian Springer, based on the Dagstuhl work
  • Supporting Data Consistency in Concurrent Process Execution with Assurance Points and Invariant Rules by Susan Urban, Andrew Courter, Le Gao and Mary Shuman
  • Probabilistic Event Calculus based on Markov Logic Networks by Anastasios Skarlatidis, Georgios Paliouras, George Vouros and Alexander Artikis
  • On Applying Temporal Database Concepts to Event Queries by Foruhar Ali Shiva and Susan Urban
  • Event Condition Expectation (ECE) Rules for Monitoring Observable Systems by Stefano Bragaglia, Federico Chesani, Paola Mello, Marco Montali, Davide Sottara and Emory Fry.

TIBCO is also sponsoring the BBC / Business Rules Forum event, and indeed TIBCO’s Nimbus CEO Ian Gotts is also presenting here. Looks like a busy 2 weeks - please look me up if you are attending any of these events!

bbc2010 is a process, rules and analyst conference in Alexandria in the DC area this week, and seems to be very well attended. Upstairs is the co-located Predictive Analytics World conference, where the TIBCO Spotfire stand seems to be very busy. Downstairs are the rule engine / management vendors, with a sprinkling of modelling tools (and, er, Microsoft showing off Visio). Not much for the CEP community?

First, I spot a rule engine vendor announcing the “simplifying of complex event processing”. It seems they have some customers applying their rule engine to event sources (although I’m not sure what they are simplifying - compared to what, I wonder?).

Next, the Rule Vendor panel, hosted by IDC’s Stephen Hendrick. An end-user asks the question “How does CEP relate and compare with what you do?”. The panelists squirm in their seats, visibly pale, and there is silence. OK, I made that last bit up: they all made a good effort on the response. For example, IBM’s Brett Stineman commented that many IBM customers have been asking for combined event processing and decisioning in the same platform - which makes plenty of sense. Stephen also makes it clear that IDC are seeing a lot of interest in “sense and respond” applications from their industry customers.

After this I find I am late for the BPM vendor panel, and enter to find Progress’ Rick Geneva and then Pega’s Stephen Zisk introducing themselves with comments on the need for event processing and event-centric views. I wonder if perhaps they have renamed this the “Event Processing” panel while I wasn’t looking. Sanity returns with Singularity’s Dermot McCauley - a Case Management company. I flick through the Singularity handout. What? It talks about “sensing - recognising opportunities and threats”. “Goal-driven” - something I can use state models to define goal states and their intermediatories. “Knowledge-intensive”, meaning lots of rules. “Highly variable processes”. “Long running”, so stateful processes. Etc etc. So, more than a little overlap here too.

Seems CEP has come of age, and maybe next year we will have a Business Event Forum to join the Rule, Process and Analyst Forums at this conference. Sounds like attendees and vendors expect it!

The next event for your calendar is the 13th edition of a long running and successful conference series, covering “business rules” in all their business documentation and executable-decision forms.

Business Rules Forum, 17-21 Oct, Washington DC

So BRForum is being co-located with Business Analysis Forum and Business Process Forum as a part of the Building Business Capability 2010 conference. The BRForum part has up to 3 tracks covering Rule Capture, Rule Organisation and Deployment, and Decision Management. With another 3 equivalent tracks for BPForum, and 1 for the BA conference, there will be up to 7 parallel tracks! If that is not sufficient, there is also the “1st World Congress on Decision Tables” hosted by tabular-logic expert Jan Vanthienen and business rules expert Ron Ross, and afterwards the RuleML event.

End-users speaking here include UNUM, The Hartford, Blue Cross Blue Shield Minsesota, Goldman Sachs, Shell, Great West Life Assurance, JC Penney, Telecom NZ, State Farm, Wells Fargo, and Fanny Mae.

The CEP session is by yours truly covering “CEP, Rules Engine or Process Engine - What Businesses are Choosing” - something for everyone in all the conference tracks!

Conference costs are from $1395 covering all 3 events. I wonder if I should volunteer a general CEP Tutorial too? Would there be enough interest?