I can’t say I’m a huge fan of the term “edBPM” as all managed business processes rely on events - it’s a bit like saying “flexible agile development”… However the goal is worthy enough, as it is to convey the use of event processing technology in automated business processes. For this reason I am also not a fan of the “Management” part in “edBPM” - pureplay BPM systems like TIBCO AMX BPM provide management of (human-oriented) business processes, whilst automated business processes have different, simpler, “management” needs. A more accurate term might be CEP-based Business Processing, using things like inference-driven business processes with integrated decisioning and business monitoring… but this begs the question “how is this different from complex event processing” with an emphasis on the “processing”, not merely the detection of “complex events”.

This week Rainer von Ammon hosted edBPM2010 as a workshop at the ServiceWave2010 conference, which had the theme of Ubiquitous CEP or U-CEP. This was attended by representatives from a variety of institutions, from a large European telco to a Chinese University. And the variety of interests around U-CEP was fascinating - brain systems, socio-economic organisations and the like - all of which seemed far more interesting than a computer scientist might initially imagine. The “discussion table” I attended focussed on CEP in manufacturing for which the STM use case is an excellent example, and for which the German University of Siegen team described their work with a specialist metal foundry (constructing, for example, aluminium engine blocks for exclusive executive cars). An interesting point here was the fact that German heavy industry was investing in CEP research to remain competitive in a global economy.

Last week was another angle for CEP-based Business Processing - the OMG standards body voted to extend the “Letter Of Interest” in, and hence allow new submitters for, the proposed CMPM (Case Management Process Modelling) standard. At the beginning of this standard TIBCO had presented its plan-based, rule-driven Advanced Fulfillment Framework (AFF, now TIBCO ActiveFulfillment and ActiveCatalog) as a response to an RFI on Dynamic Business Activity Modelling. The increasing current interest in case management and “Adaptive Case Management” is part of the same swell in interest in edBPM / CEP-based Business Processing.

Now, vendors are not really allowed to create pervasive technology acronyms (as competitors naturally insist on inventing competing terms). This is a job best left for the industry analysts (or possibly bodies like EPTS). So far I have not seen much interest from them in the term “edBPM”.  And “Complex Event based Business Processing” is probably too close to “CEP” - in more senses than just the words - so “CEBP” is probably not going to fly either. Other related / overlapping / equivalent terms to edBPM have included dynamic BPM and knowledge-driven process modelling, and probably a few others. We shall see what term or terms eventually “stick” for this concept - watch this space!

There is an EU Project proposal to look at Event-driven Business Process Management, and that drove the title and interest in this panel (following neatly on from the edBPM09 workshop a few weeks back) chaired by CITT’s Rainer von Ammon.

The brief for the panel was to cover particular aspects of  “edBPM” such as:

• What is meant by edBPM? Compared with, for example, the “edBPM  Reference Model” presented at the 1st EPTS symposium in 2006?
  • TIBCO of course talks about “edBPM” as either a part of “BPM+” (from a BPM perspective) or as automated rule- and event-driven processes (from a CEP perspective). Either way, customers regularly combine complex event processing and (orchestrated, BPMN-based) workflow as well as (orchestrated, XML processing) SOA.
  • The main issues with the supplied edBPM model was that it simply combined event processing with BPEL processes. TIBCO’s edBPM customers invariably never use BPEL (why should they?), and indeed some don’t use BPMN for process models (defining models in terms of states and rules). So the main suggestion here is to go up a level in abstraction:
    • Multiple engines (that could include BPEL if you were so hindered inclined) as well as event processing algorithms or even analytics.
    • An event server (or bus).
    • Some kind of generic state store (for process states, persisted events, etc).
    • More generic models (for business control) and dashboards (cockpit or otherwise).
• Who will be the first “market mover” in exploiting the term “edBPM”?
  • This might have been disappointing to the edBPM pundits, but the vendors basically agreed that this term had no formal “legs” yet: no one had a marketing campaign around event driven BPM, no one had tried to persuade an analyst to take up (or define) the term, and the large BPM vendor and consultant community would not want their “BPM” mindshare asset diluted.
• Do we need new/enhanced standards for edBPM? And what is the challenge to insert/combine Complex Events in BPM? Versus say an example model for non-deterministic approaches like Smart Fraud Management in Banking?
  • The new BPMN2 standard has started the process of adding interesting event extensions to BPMN, while there are existing standards for other models (PRR for production rules, UML State for entity lifecycles, BMM for motivations, PMML for analytics, the proposed DMN for decision models, and so forth).
  • The Fraud example shows how some existing fraud products might work, but again is too specific - what if other event pattern detection and event pattern discovery techniques are desired?
• Related to the above point was the proposal for new standards at the domain level for edBPM…
  • “The good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from” comes to mind here: effort would be better spent event-enabling the existing standards (what are the relevant loads and what combinations of the domain data models are relevant as payloads?)…
• Although the panel did not progress to the next question, it is interesting nontheless: what is required to set up edBPM projects and/or what aspects of edBPM need to be researched further?
  • Probably there is some methodology work to be done on when to use processes, rules/queries or states and how to combine them…
  • Areas of outstanding research in edBPM are probably joint semantics (a.k.a. the promise of BPDM) across different process types (including CEP), CEP-enabled BPMN, and mergers of event operations with (some aspect of the voluminous domain of) the SOA service standards.

The original CITT proposal can be found at http://www.citt-online.com/downloads/EDBPM-IP-proposal.ppt .