… was the catchy snappy hip punchy title of our contribution to this year’s BPM(I) (aka OMG) Think Tank 2008’s RoundTable sessions. These are used to get feedback from end-users, consultants and indeed other vendors on a variety of issues - which in this case was the role of Complex Event Processing and business events in BPM (aka BPMN models).
For a warm-up, Jim Sinur (Gartner) gave a keynote covering “The Economics of Business Process”, explaining that businesses should expect to invest in BPM in a down-economy as they have even more to gain than in an up-economy. More to the point, he expanded on the need to augment conventional BPM with things like decision management, rule-driven processes, complex event processing, and maybe even “scenario management” (which could mean any of case management, case-based reasoning, or test case generation - it wasn’t clear). In particular Jim mentioned:
- the role of complex events combined with AI techniques to improve decisions
- rules will need to “surround” process, not just be invoked from decision tasks
Jim was a good segue into the CEP-BPMS roundtable, whose participants included a large insurance company, a DOD supplier, a government agency, the co-creator of the BPMN modeling standard, and some curious fellow (BPM and EA) vendors.
Firstly, and not surprisingly, none of the participants disputed the value of CEP to business processes. There were a few different areas of CEP-BPM focus that were discussed:
- CEP providing a generic business-logic container for cross-process / cross-BPMS / cross-abstraction-level, system+process monitoring (a bit like TIBCO SPM provides, but more general)
- CEP was another reason for standardizing the enterprise view of events and event patterns alongside processes - as BPMN events provide a very process / task-oriented view of an event, which may have a totally different meaning in some other process (see also the OMG EMP effort for event metamodels, which hopefully EPTS will have an input to)
- Agility was provided by the CEP elements (like state models, declarative inference rules) being “easier to maintain” than (some) large process flows, as well as the fact that event-driven decisions are more useful in real-time scenarios where high responsiveness is required
- The use of rules, queries, states, alongside or augmenting process flows overlaps with “knowledge representation / management” (which is an interesting thought)
- CEP also had a BAM-type role to play in business process control and oversight: one participant used the terms “issue prevention, detection and correction”, which is a neat description.
The slides for the session (roundtable intro and feedback) are available in the file BPMI_EPandPRoundtableResults1008.pdf .
