“Gentlemen’s magazine” Esquire has an article by Ryan D’Agostino about TIBCO CEO Vivek Ranadive and mentions the new tibbr-based application for coordinating strategies and tactics among world leaders at WEF.

TopCom, … is a private communications platform for the two hundred most powerful people in the world.

TopCom is being officially launched in late January at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. It is basically a customized, ridiculously secure version of tibbr, a platform developed by Tibco as a kind of combination Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, texting, and Skype. It is a private social network, essentially - in this case, for world leaders.

… The top two hundred WEF members - basically, the people who run the world - can speak to one another on a given subject, and then they can choose to loop in members from lower tiers (experts, academics, etc.) as needed, widening the pool of knowledge on whatever problem is on the table.

…Tibco consulted with both the Japanese prime minister at the time of last year’s tsunami, Naoto Kan, and his successor, Noda, when it was developing its presentation for the WEF board of directors, to find out what would have been useful to them at the time of the disaster. Schwab, too, collaborated. The result, which will be on display in Davos, is the first time a global organization will introduce its own proprietary communications platform. …

IDC’s Stephen Hendrick presented on Decision Management at BBC2011, and (of course!) commented that the future of business rule tooling was likely to be sense and respond (CEP) event processing capabilities. Stephen also presented an IDC model on social / collaborative development - something also touched upon by Paul Haley in his talks on the future of  “knowledge management” in the BBC2011 and RulesFest conferences.

As TIBCO is also a major provider of social media technology (tibbr), it is worth maybe suggesting what “collaboration” might mean in terms of operational systems.

• Social collaboration starts with text, not images / diagrams (/voice / video)

Although it is possible to display / allow constrained edits  to / verify / validate visual models like BPMN, state models and so on, these don’t fit too neatly on the average smartphone that is the base platform for social media. So one is more likely to collaborate against a textual representation of such models, but more often than not that textual model will look like… a ruleset.

• Representing text forms on social media like tibbr is easy

Displaying a rule editor in a chat session is not difficult. Collaboration models could also involve adding refactoring tools to allow rules to be split, joined, extended, subclassed etc. But at some point you need a specialist editor in your chat session - if only to keep track of the suggested changes / evolution. IDC’s model also adds more user roles that will need specialist controls too, like the discussion “leader”, “guider”, “critic” etc.

While some such collaboratively-developed rulesets might be considered as overly complex for social-media development, there are certainly areas that could benefit from this form of interactive development: consider specifying complex event definitions using an event pattern language. Or providing examples for a non-discrete event pattern mechanism like Netrics (now TIBCO Patterns) to learn from. This could be very interesting for certain industries to explore!

Note: this session also blogged about here.

Thanks to Vaz Balasingham for an interesting link to an Economist article published last year on “Mining Social Networks” - how big corporations, like telcos, that focus just on “big profit” customers using big data analytics, could well be using a flawed short-term-only strategy. Larger business effects (and hence business profites) can be caused by “big influence” customers - an extreme example of which is something like the Oprah Winfrey Show’s book recommendations. Large numbers of smaller influence groups occur everywhere, and this is of course where “social networks” provide rich sources of information (and possibly opportunities for the marketeers to influence trends…).

The role of CEP in all this is quite simple: the analytics themselves can be data-based or event-based, but the requirement to act (i.e. make an event-driven decision) is a real-time business action. The article mentions:

The trick, then, is to identify such trendsetting subscribers and keep them on board with special discounts and promotions.

Or rather, to make sure they have the attention of your business. And the attention span of the business has to be real-time, not batch-time, so that when a “lose customer” event is predicted the appropriate mitigation is carried out!

Notes:

1. TIBBR, TIBCO’s own social networking technology, can also be a source of data for analytics. In particular, text-based analytics such as those provided by Netrics might be useful to indicate trends…

2. The article also had a very prescient quote: …societies with longstanding and strong social and business ties abroad weather change well. In relatively closed countries, like Egypt, rapid shifts in social networks can trigger upheaval…

A few months ago we speculated that events (and event processing) “in the cloud” would probably appear best suited to some social networking type of application (in addition to the usual Platform-As-A-Service remote “systems center” use case). Lo and behold, TIBCO has introduced a corporate “twitter-type” service called tibbr for distributing messages across an organization, deployed into the cloud, and based on the TIBCO Silver cloud product. Soft of antithesis of MS Sharepoint…

For those wondering on the relevance of tibbr to TIBCO CEP technologies, note that TIBCO Silver exploits TIBCO BusinessEvents CEP technology under the covers. tibbr also exploits  TIBCO ActiveSpaces. As for tibbr potentially being used as an event channel for direct processing of tibbr messages in BusinessEvents - well this should certainly be possible, but finding some good use cases might be a challenge.