At the suggestion of Brenda Michelson I spent some time listening to a podcast by Ed Lynch of IBM prepared for a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Consortium meeting in June 2008. You can download it here. I have written how IBM hides its BPM candle under the SOA basket. Ed is the product manager for the IBM Business Process Management (BPM) and Connectivity Portfolio—the stuff I believe IBM hides under the SOA umbrella. This podcast shines a lot of light on the subject.
(NOTE: I am not recommending an IBM product in this Viewpoint but I highly recommend IBM’s comprehensive view of the BPM problems you face as introduced in Ed’s presentation. Other freely available IBM material can also help. In addition, although Ed keeps his presentation non-IBM propaganda as much as possible, the slides give excellent examples.)
You can start with the title “… Business Event Process for Agile Business Process.� It is important to understand how the nature of event processing affects the value proposition of BPM. I write often that BPM covers a spectrum from workflow through straight through processing (STP), from the Internet to the Intranet, from data-driven to event-driven processes, across thousands of different industry protocols, and more. After reviewing the big picture, Ed’s podcast explains how IBM looks at the event processing aspect of the spectrum. In particular look at Slide 16.
Ed’s key concept is that events are “inherently IT� signals or beacons, from the infrastructure (a server, a device, etc.). IBM uses the tagline “sense and respond� to explain how this happens.
Another key ingredient is how the event processing functionality recognizes context or patterns. (For a discussion of when event processing is more or a less complex, see this recent ebizQ article.)
-- Dennis Byron
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