EbizQ’s Joe McKendrick published an interview this month with the authors of “Smart Enough Systems” - Neil Raden and James Taylor (specialists in BI and decision management respectively) - titled “Decision Management technology enters the mainstream”. Joe writes:

Enter decision management systems, which not only are capable of analyzing the value of data to an organization, but then engage rules engines to automate the decision outcome.

James mentions event-driven systems in his comments about the types of solutions in the decision management space:

The decision management systems market - products that support automated decisioning in some fashion - consists of platform and application technologies. Platform products are things like business rules management systems, optimization engines and predictive analytic workbenches.  … In addition, there are pre-configured decision management systems that provide a decision engine -real-time offer management system or a fraud detection system for instance. These typically embed some rules and analytics technology as well as actual rules and models and handle a small group of related decisions. These are mostly in consumer risk, which includes underwriting, loan origination, and retail credit; fraud detection, which includes claims, credit card, and medical; and marketing, which includes next-best offers and retention. Of course, some CRM or marketing systems include these capabilities, just as some BPM or event-processing platforms include business rules and analytic capabilities.

James is quite correct there: indeed event-driven decision management seems to be the increasingly popular overlap between CEP and decision management. CEP technologies like the TIBCO BusinessEvents platform provide both such event-driven rule / decision automation (and management).

Good to see ebizQ interviewing Gartner’s Roy Schulte on the value of CEP to applications’ operational intelligence (as we call it) or IQ (as Roy calls it). Makes me wonder if Gartner is developing an IQ metric for organisations based on their agility, responsiveness, etc through exploiting technologies like CEP. I guess that would be a kind of IT Business Maturity Model…

Anyone interested in reading more on Roy’s views would be recommended to check out the book “Event Processing - Designing IT Systems for Agile Companies” he co-authored with Prof Mani Chandy.

EbizQ is running a series of articles (first here and second here, curiously classified under “Social BPM“) on “dynamic BPM”, quoting luminaries such as Gartner’s Janelle Hill and Jim Sinur, and Forrester’s Clay Richardson.

In the simplest terms, [dynamic BPM] supports rapid “on the fly” process adjustments. “You can respond to emerging conditions and changing business needs, in some cases without any interruption to IT or without having IT get involved,” explains Jim Sinur…

Dynamic BPM is described as having various levels of complexity:

• rule/decision-based selection of processes / process paths - see (good old) decision management / rule technology
• dynamic configuration of parts of processes - usually a variation of the above, with decision rules determining what tasks to do and in which order
• goal-driven processes - selection of processes and process tasks is entirely based on some mechanism for addressing a route to a goal

So lets look at some of the examples mentioned:

• railroads using RFID sensors to monitor passing traincars (a.k.a. “sense and respond”)
• complex algorithms to determine where to deploy troops (normally requiring “situation awareness”)
• government document tracking (a.k.a. “track and trace”)
• pharmaceutical and fragrance design process involving ad hoc partner participation (i.e. “social BPM”)

For sure, CEP and event processing is at least a “major contributor” and in reality probably the solution for the “sense and respond” and “track and trace” application areas. And it helps with “situation awareness” in the real-time domain.

What is fascinating is that the term “dynamic BPM” seems to really mean “any type of process that is not associated with simple, fixed task orchestration” - in other words,  “non-BPM” technologies like CEP.  One perspective is that one of the main drivers for processes to be “dynamic” is the ability to respond to change - i.e. events. Indeed, the need is for many business processes to take account of there being larger quantities and higher rates of events that can be deemed important. Another is to use more sophisticated solutions to solve or optimise more complex problems - think of classical planning and scheduling algorithms and predictive analytics, for example.

Probably the “dynamic BPM complexity levels” described in the article can be mapped to the following, based on increasing levels of event-handling capability:

• pre-defined, late-selected process paths: subprocesses are pre-defined
• no-predetermined-path processes, where rules or more complex algorithms determine what tasks need to take place - sets of tasks are allocated based on conditions and events: tasks are predefined
• goal-oriented and semantic processes, where goal states are reached by the dynamic selection of tasks based on current events and situation: tasks may be constructed on-the-fly, and processes and plans changed according to the situation and events.

There are other viewpoints as well - for example, adaptive case management (for non-automated, changeable processes), currently the subject of an OMG standardisation effort. Related to things like goal-driven fulfillment technologies like TIBCO AF and AC. Perhaps we are returning to - dare I say it - knowledge-based processes ?

I leave the final words to a quote:

…according to Gartner Inc: “By 2013, dynamic BPM will be an imperative for companies seeking process efficiencies in increasingly chaotic environments.”

Note Joe doesn’t ask if it is required, necessary, or useful - just affordable.

It’s an interesting question. Here are some additional thoughts:

1. EDA and CEP does not replace BPM, SOA or databases.

Events still drive processes (human) and services (IT) - and indeed CEP can be thought of as an event driven process or service. And events end up being needed to be stored for historical analysis / analytics - so a database is still necessary somewhere in the architecture…

2. Are EDA and CEP less affordable than SOA and databases?

Not really. The technology is getting pretty mature now - consider the ubiquity of messaging middleware - and CEP incorporates the “best practices” of IT from SOA and database worlds - e.g. declarative rules, model-driven, object-oriented, distibuted storage, event streams and patterns … but this is still a “value” metric, not an “affordability” one. The affordability comes down to development and deployment costs versus ROI: development can be quicker, and deployment can often avoid a boatload of application server nonsense (i.e. administrative stuff that is not business logic). And the ROI of the ensuing “operational intelligence” can of course be immense.

3. Is “open source” the saviour of affordability?

I saw this was one (and a typical) response to Joe. Again, not really - open source tooling has its place, especially for educating ourselves. But affordability is a lifecycle issue not a development tool cost - and I am reminded by the customer who spend a few months trying to build something with an open source tool that was solved in a few weeks with TIBCO BusinessEvents. And most CEP vendors provide evaluation copies that mitigate up-front costs. Remember “open source” is just one more business model option for “vendors” (where the “vending” is of support, maintenance, services etc).

4. Is there any proof of affordability vs value etc?

I can’t say I’ve come across many folk who have said “nice but we can’t afford it” - from a cost perspective anyway. Often IT budgets are consumed in getting existing IT systems functioning - the affordability is affected by the non-affordability of existing IT infrastructure. Most EDA and CEP systems of course integrate rather than replace conventional IT, and there is an additional emphasis - not burden - on IT architects in organisations to understand what fits where. But architects I have met like EDA and CEP (albeit I am unlikely to meet uninterested architects!). Some use cases show pretty powerful ROIs.

5. If EDA and CEP is affordable, what is the problem?

Entrenched views. CIOs bought up on data-first mentalities. Not enough “thinking outside the box”. Anything that resists paradigm shifts. Which is fully understandable, and why there will be steady, not revolutionary, growth in CEP and EDA markets. Although the published growth data looks pretty impressive!

The full discussion is on ebizQ here.

Two more links of interest to the event processing community:

• Jim Sinur comments that the Japanese business process marketplace is “ready for dynamic BPM”…

A Goal of Greater Agility with BPM: The audience was keen to hear about the inclusion of complex events processing, business rules management, unstructured processes, process snippets and social technologies in the evolving BPM technologies. Japan has been a leader in standard processes for a long time and there is a need to make new and dynamic processes.

I see a continued differentiation in products here: for example, TIBCO AMX BPM is a very strong contender in the “conventional BPM” stakes, whereas the TIBCO BusinessEvents CEP tool us more for extreme performance, exception-riddled, unstructured (a.k.a. non-orchestrated) rule-driven operations… but of course these technologies can work together as needed.

• Doug Mow placed an article up on ebizQ on “Real Business Benefits for Real Time BPM”, covering “real-time claims adjudication” in the healthcare industry.

Using BPM to improve auto adjudication for claims validation, routing, eligibility check and payment submission can deliver huge gains.

This time it seems it is not CEP that is being confused (or conflated into) BPM, but business rules and decisions. Claim validation? Rules. Routing? Rules. Eligibility check? Rules. Payment submission? Ah - that could be a business process! And real-time rules are another term for event-driven rules… meaning, again, event processing.

Of course, this is not really “heresy” against the BPM community. The fact is that the term “business process” can be viewed as being much wider than the current BPM community - is not the detection of some event pattern a kind of process? In an agent that is matching events to decisions an event-driven process?