I was at OMG this week when the submissions for the proposed “case management standard” (called Case Management Process Modelling or CMPM) were discussed. What was interesting was that one of the submissions spent a lot of time positioning ECA - Event Condition Action - rules as a means to model and execute the launching of activities and achievement of milestones in cases.

ECA is of course a widely used CEP paradigm: in a tool like TIBCO BusinessEvents the ECA rules are defined as conventional (in OMG parlance, PRR-type) production rules, where an event is just like any other fact to drive the rules. ECA rules also drive the traversal of state models (and state machines at runtime), as well as coordinate the conventional manual business processes. It is therefore interesting that Case Management - considered by many to be just an extension to BPM and mostly achievable with BPMN - is also proving to be an example of business process mechanism convergence (e.g. BPMN-type BPM orchestration of explicit activities, for example representing a plan, working alongside declarative rule constructs and technologies like ECA rules). For a real-world example of the latter, take a look at TIBCO Fulfillment Orchestration.

Of course, what neither the “rule technology world” nor these CMPM submissions have defined is a good business modeling technique to represent ECA rules. Such a business model may take the form of something as simple as a rule template, or something like a decision model. On the latter front, standardisation of decision models via the OMG DMN (Decision Model and Notation) effort seems to be gaining steam with pretty much all the main players in the process of registering (via Letters Of Intent) to take part. A good sign for process *and* rule standardisation … and of course decisions are somewhat useful in case management too!

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…

… is the title for the replacement to (and presumed superset of) the Case Management OMG specification proposal, per this report from OMG task force co-chair Fred Cummins, albeit within the interesting context of advanced healthcare IT [*1].

Very relevant to the knowledge-driven medical domain (and to case management) is the ability to respond to events (as in event-driven or event-based processes) - events provide new information that extend both the current patient and medical condition knowledgebases, for example. Out-of-sequence and disruptive events need to be handled, and medical deductions and conclusions can certainly be defined as “complex events” (i.e. aggregations and combinations of prior events) … probably with the addition of some probability factor!

Also very relevant is that inference rules are one of the more useful knowledge representation mechanisms - used both in formal logic as well as business rule engines - making rule-driven processes truly declarative, ad hoc and dynamic. Event-driven and rule-driven processes are both areas covered by CEP technologies like TIBCO BusinessEvents. And in OMG inference rules are covered by the PRR extension to UML.

On the other hand, the term “knowledge-driven” [*2] can cover a number of things beyond “event-driven business processes” and “rule-driven business processes”. For example, events can be viewed as documentable and classifiable constructs for use in ontologies (like OWL), and rules can be followed by medical staff, such as via checklists or flowcharts. There is also the domain of “knowledge management” in the form of content or document management  - probably ideal for case note recordings.

Fred’s comments include:

“Knowledge-driven processes for treatment of medical conditions will support intuitive medicine with improved tracking and record-keeping while supporting performance measurement and encoding of insights to improve and streamline practices.” Whenever I read “tracking” and “performance measurement” I think of event tracking and concepts like “track and trace”. When I  read “encoding of insights” I see “situation awareness”. Note these are both key complex event processing indicators!

“Specifications of activities can easily be changed to introduce new technology or to provide guidance in the use of certain procedures or medications. More precise processes can be incorporated using conventional business process modeling technology, but processes can still be adjusted to deal with unforeseen circumstances.” I’m pretty sure Fred doesn’t mean to imply ad hoc processes are imprecise, but in fact may be selected or defined according to current knowledge. Knowledge representation in automated systems usually involves rules - and event-driven rules are typical of CEP technology.

“Both intuitive and precise processes can be interwoven and evolved as improved techniques that are discovered or developed.” This means ad-hoc processes mixing manual and automated processing. Most medical processes involve a health-practitioner-in-the-loop, so this makes perfect sense.

In my humble opinion, knowledge-driven processes (including medical processes), and their associated models, are a very interesting area, with much overlap with the state-of-the-art rule-driven CEP world. Whether there is enough concensus for a standardization effort yet, given (1) only 2 vendors responded to the preceding OMG RFI on “dynamic process activity modeling” and (2) “knowledge-driven process” is such a new term it doesn’t even have an entry on Wikipedia yet (!), is open to debate… which no doubt will occur at the next OMG meeting.

Notes:

[1] Interestingly, advanced medical healthcare support is one of the first use cases in the EPTS Use Cases Working Group.

[2] Possibly the proposed standard is simply misnamed. For example a better fit might be the moniker “Ad hoc Process Modeling” (or somesuch) that would avoid any contentious issues around “knowledge” coverage and representation.

This week OMG’s Technical Meeting has had most buzz around the BPMN 2.0 submission (and congratulations to that team, for which TIBCO is a supporter). Some of the other stuff going on includes:

• PRR or Production Rules Representation (which, for complex event processing like in TIBCO BusinessEvents, can include event-condition-action rules using standard forward-chaining semantics) starts the Revision Task Force process for PRR1.1. A few tweaks are due, but more interesting was to see 2 more vendors attend the PRR session this week. Also, note that UML tool NoMagic is presenting on PRR at ORF’09 later in the year…
• DMN or Decision Model and Notation started on its first stage of development, which is the identification of use cases and roles for defining UML-based decisions for a future RFP. We had some good discussions (which I’ll report in a future post once I have reported to the DMN community), and it is clear that this could be a very key standard for business modelers, end-users and tool vendors. Of course the relevance of this to event processing is that many CEP/EP systems’ role is to support decisions…

A somewhat hotter debate continues (/is) regarding the proposed Case Management RFP, which was developed from a Dynamic Business Activity Modeling RFI last year (which TIBCO responded to, and was also covered by our session at the recent Semantic BPM day in Berlin). Many BPM applications are also case management applications, but some case management requires more sophisticated event-handling, rule-driven processes, decision management, and case record management and recording (technologies that TIBCO mostly covers under BPM+). One school of thought is that the more sophisticated requirements for case management need to be rolled into the common BPM standards stack (including BPMN); another is that multiple different standards should be used flor flexibility (such as combining BPMN with BMM, PRR and DMN). From an event processing perspective, of course, case management (by one definition at least!) involves applying incoming events to the state of some case in order to determine whether processes need to be started, continued, halted or changed - in other words CEP technology can often be applied for case management areas in government, finance, healthcare, etc.

Some of the other case management discussions can be found from EBizQ, Bruce Silver, and Derek Miers.