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…

… was one made at the recent webinar promoting an OASIS standard for system event processing. Odd though, as of the 3 (non-TIBCO) vendors involved, one has acquired a Business Rule Management System provider, and one used to be a big provider of Business Rule Engines…

Now “rule maintenance” (/management) is a specialized type of content management, and related to other types of business model management (including business process management). Typically it’s just decision rules that are managed formally by business users (as opposed to, say, data relationship rules which are usually “baked in” to IT databases too much to be easily modified) [*1].

So, being generous, perhaps the OASIS speaker was referring to the lack of capability to easily manage and maintain all possible types of business rules in an application… although cynics might argue it was just a comment to justify not tieing SAF too closely to rules execution and rules engines…

Notes:

[1] TIBCO’s offering in rule management - TIBCO BusinessEvents Decision Manager - covers decision services and agents for use within BusinessEvents applications to be applied to business events as they are detected.

My thanks to Robin Cover at standards body OASIS for pointing out to me the OASIS Symptoms Autonomic Framework initiative. From the OASIS TC page, SAF is meant to:

“… integrate information and processes across the organization … by defining, enhancing, and maintaining a standard XML-based framework that will enable the collection, detection, isolation, and remediation/optimization of the operational or business characteristics of complex systems with applicability to both IT and non-IT domains including operational and service management, governance, and security.”

If that paragraph proves difficult to digest, the overview goes on to say more succinctly:

“SAF is intended to provide a common language for exchange of event-driven data in a distributed-computing, multi-vendor environment.”

In other words this is either a DSL or XSD  for “control events”, of the type handled by TIBCO’s CEP-based ActiveMatrix Service Performance Manager (i.e. the autonomic services’ performance policy engine) and its cloud (TIBCO Silver) oriented derivative. So it should certainly be targeting complex event processing of these control events.

The SAF Charter explains the SAF goals further as:

“Ensure that the specifications can be applied to various sources of event data, enabling a methodology to perform pattern matching, diagnostics, and analysis in order to achieve a timely and accurate resolution of a wide range of IT and non-IT situations.”

Sounds possibly a little wide-ranging, but we assume the 3 (as of Oct09) member organizations know where they are going with this.

The charter goes on to describe the medical-based terminology used in SAF, including  “symptom” as a current state, “syndrome” as a collection of symptoms, “protocols” used to generate “prescriptions” which in turn are (data) used to confirm, remediate or optimize a syndrome. Syndrome confirmation is (naturally enough!) via a “diagnosis” effected through  “validating Symptoms”. One wonders what ailments the authors had when coming up with this healthcare-analogous vocabulary!

The architecture roles mentioned also stay in the “doctors and nurses” theme: we have a Syndrome and Protocol Catalogs, a Symptom Store, a Diagnostician, a Practitioner (to administer Prescriptions), and a Case Manager (general manager). Probably someone could do a reasonable mapping of these to the EPTS Glossary and Architecture work…

Looking at the White Paper from the SAF docs collection we see a much closer correlation to the CEP world with use cases of “Denial Of Service attacks” (a.k.a security), “identity theft” (i.e. fraud), energy industry “data analysis”, and manufacturing “process optimization”.

Overall this looks an interesting effort - interesting in that the authors have found a compelling reason to develop the SAF standard, rather than the content itself - but one would expect that persuading end-user organizations to comply with a SAF approach to automating diagnostics and remedies will be a tall order. If the standard does prove compelling, then Complex Event Processing tools like TIBCO BusinessEvents should have no problem in reading SAF payloads, applying SAF roles and implementing SAF-type implementations. So one to keep an eye on, then…