Last week TIBCO hosted the first Face2Face meeting of the decision modelling / management experts from FICO, IBM and Oracle representing one of the submission teams for the OMG Decision Model and Notation standard. Although we cannot divulge any details of the meeting results, suffice to say that progress was considered as “good” by all concerned… publication (to OMG) of the first draft of this and the other submissions is due in May 2012.

From an event processing perspective, current decision-based methodologies mostly focus on the “decision as a service” (DaaS?) type models and associated stateless executable artifacts - think TIBCO ActiveMatrix Decisions and TIBCO BusinessEvents Decision Manager, and their equivalents Oracle Business Rules, IBM Websphere Ilog JRules, and FICO Blaze Advisor. Here a decision is something that occurs at a point in time, based on data / information valid at the time of decision, with some explicit process required to revisit said decision.

However for event-based decisions, we can also consider decisions as a continuous operation. This is best illustrated by the “decision” made when some event pattern is identified: the pattern may be identified and/or disqualified multiple times for the same entity, based for example on complex and sophisticated business rules (that may themselves be changing over time). A typical mechanism for this might be inference rules (as seen in TIBCO BusinessEvents). I would expect later versions of DMN to be extended to cover rule-based and continuous-evaluation decisions, but DMN version 1 will likely cover the simpler “Decision as a Process Task” role (where “process task” could be a BPMN Business Rule Activity or a dynamic rule-driven activity). The differences in decision models for continuous versus decision-point based decisions is an interesting area for future discussion!

My thanks again to the participants of the F2F for a successful meeting.

One of the other interesting meetings at the recent OMG standards event was by the Finance Domain Task Force on the requirement for a “Trade Transaction Traceability” standard to meet the regulatory requirements of Dodd-Frank (full name: Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act). The idea here is to provide an audit trail (or log), to some SEC-approved XBRL- based XML format, of all the activities and processes that are involved in a “trade” in an investment bank. Thence the need for track-and-trace across front, middle and back office systems.

From a CEP perspective, this is more of a risk management problem than the typical low-latency algo-trading application usually associated with stream-processing CEP in the financial markets. A typical solution for trade track-and-trace would combine some combination of TIBCO Hawk monitoring and TIBCO BusinessEvents CEP to correlate trade processing throughout the bank into a single audit trail while minimising footprints and impacts on existing processes and execution times. Another solution, also CEP-based, would adapt TIBCO Active Service Gateway as a “financial service router” or Services Monitor / Message Interceptor (doing discrete monitoring to create the audit trail).

The OMG is continuing to work on this proposal, and their use of trade and process event correlations (using CEP) could also provide an input to the planned OMG Event Metamodel and Profile standard. And a similar, existing CEP use case is planned as a presentation by an existing TIBCO customer at TUCON this year (in conjunction with an update on TIBCO Hawk technology for the “edge of the Event Processing Network”)…

I was going to blog on the presentations at the Decision Modeling Information Day at OMG, but suffice to say that James Taylor has already done a great job of this so I will just add a few comments from the CEP perspective…

1. CEP can be viewed just as “complex event” detection… but increasingly businesses want “complex  event” *processing*, where processing is not just event detection but also decision and reaction. Of course, the reaction can be a traditional orchestrated business process, as in a pattern like:

(a) detect fraud event (b) decide appropriate action (c) react with the Fraud Handling business process

2. Business modeling of decisions, as well as complex events, is an area that none of the traditional business modeling tools seem to be taking seriously. Yet both decision automation and CEP provide huge values to business operations.

3. Methodologists on the decision modeling side are finding receptive audiences in business. These include the KPI Decision Model, which was endorsed by Mark Pettit from Freddie Mac at the info day, the new BRS Question-Charts, and Alan Fish’s DRA. Adapting these for real-time, event-based decisions should be possible, as Larry Goldberg from KPI discussed in the meeting: the main difference with top-down analysis of decisions is that you may or may not be able to detect some of the desired business events!

4. There were some good questions on the role of analytics in, for example, driving CEP-based decisions, or in risk management for trading systems. For example, TIBCO Spotfire Data Miner can be used to generate rules for classification decisions inside a TIBCO BusinessEvents CEP system dealing with high volumes of trading events in a stateful manner.

5. The proposed DMN standard discussed at the end of the Information Day should of course equally apply to decisions in CEP as well as BPM.

Very impressive work, by a team led by Mark Linehan of IBM Research, on Date Time was presented by NIST’s Ed Barkmeyer at OMG this week. This is a “work in progress” for likely completion later this year but clearly could play an important role in temporal operations in event processing.

To quote from the latest draft, the objectives of this work are:

1. Provide a Standard Business Vocabulary for Date and Time Concepts. Provide a vocabulary of date and time concepts that business users can share and exploit in their business domain vocabularies and rules…
2. Support Machine Reasoning about Time. Provide a formal ontology that enables machine interpretation and reasoning…
3. Enable implementation…

It covers a time infrastructure (intervals, Allen Relations, durations and SBVR “states of affairs” such as events and situations), organizing time in calendars, “indexical time concepts” such as the meaning of “now” etc in a business context, and so forth. Indeed it seems the only thing NOT covered are the ad hoc adjustments of “leap seconds” to a “year” that are made every now again. And there are versions for UML, SBVR and CLIF, and plans an ODM / OWL version.

OMG has posted the (latest) agenda for next month’s Decision Modeling information day - subject to change only if any other vendors sign up to show off their approaches to decision modeling. So far the agenda looks quite balanced:

• methodologies and notations: chiefly these are
  • Prof Jan Vanthienen (”Mr Decision Table”) and
  • Knowledge Partners Inc (authors of the book “The Decision Model”)
• vendors and tools: a good spead of capabilities here (updated!):
  • New Wisdom covering the repository of what we used to call “source rules” - the business texts for terms and facts as well as decisions
  • IBM Ilog, as the most successful BRMS tool around today, chiefly supporting the Websphere SOA model
  • TIBCO BusinessEvents Decision Manager, supporting the real-time decisioning and CEP market
  • OpenRules, and using Microsoft Office tools for decision management
  • Sapiens, covering their tooling for decision modelling

Keynote is being given by James Taylor (co-author of  “Smart Enough Systems”) who also promises to give his insights into what decision modeling is all about.

This is all by the way of introducing not only the ideas of decision modeling, but a proposed standard (DMN) in this space, to help enterprises like Wells Fargo and others who use multiple decision table, model and execution environments and want to improve efficiencies and re-use through standardised notations etc.

Should be an interesting session in an interesting week: the day after this the EPTS Virtual Symposium is taking place at the same location…