The TIBCO AFF solution framework has evolved into a product. Or actually 2. These help solve the “business ‘Order to Cash’ problem” otherwise known as “Fulfillment”.

• TIBCO ActiveFulfillment drives customer order validation and fulfillment processes in a dynamic, automated manner. This reduces manual provisioning processes, improves Customer experience by providing rules-driven order validation and process checking, reduces Order and Provisioning errors, and provides jeopardy management.
• TIBCO ActiveCatalog is a comprehensive and flexible Product Offering Catalog. ActiveCatalog allows business users to define new product and service offerings using a building block approach, augmented with rule definitions expressing Offer Eligibility and Provisioning Process rules.

ActiveFulfillment embeds the TIBCO BusinessEvents engine as well as TIBCO BPM. ActiveCatalog is based on the TIBCO CIM MDM solution. Some thoughts on these:

• ActiveFulfillment is effectively a dynamic process management system, with some aspects of case management too (different processes involved over time, process changes driven by events, etc).
• ActiveCatalog includes cataloging and managing some of the business rules used in product management. Indeed business rule definitions are certainly “master data” in any organisation! This could be a trend…

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...]