James Taylor's Decision Management

Jack van Hoof wrote a great post over on his blog about "How EDA extends SOA and why it is important". Jack does a nice job of explaining how the approaches differ and how they complement each other, primarily around the difference in the degree of coupling. I think decision management and building decision services is key to both approaches. Handling events automatically and making critical decisions in processes both require business decisions to be automated and business rules and analytics are ideal for this. I have posted before about rules in different approaches like CEP/BAM and on the different kinds of rules one can consider in these approaches. The agility you need might not come from either the loose coupling of EDA or the composite application assembly of SOA but from being able the change the logic within components rapidly. These services/components cannot be developed using traditional development styles if you want them to be agile and controlled by the business. For that you need business rules and other decision technologies.

Whether you are using SOA, EDA or both, don't forget to manage the decisions you need in them.

Technorati Tags: business agility, business rules, CEP, EDA, event processing, service, SOA, event driven architecture