Event-driven and decision-centric - James Taylor's Decision Management

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April 26, 2007
Event-driven and decision-centric

Enabling the Event-Driven Enterprise by Mike Lough is an interesting take on the need to better exploit events, something often tied to decision-making. Mike makes some good points in this article and a couple in particular made me want to reply or add to what he said.

For example, financial services firms require real-time events to protect their customer's identities and assets from fraudulent behavior.

This is not just an event-based thing. While it is true that catching fraud means responding quickly to events, it also means using rules and analytics together (what many call Enterprise Decision Management)

They need to receive the events in real-time, not even 'near real-time' to gain a competitive advantage and efficiently run their business.

I have blogged before about Real-time v right-time but I also think that the issue is one of acting first not knowing first. Good event notification can help you know first, good decision automation can help you act first too.

Benefits include enhanced business processes, improved decision-making, efficient marketing, better user experiences, lower costs and increase revenues

This reminded me of why you should manage decisions (one of my first posts on this blog) and to remind everyone of the value of managing decisions as a corporate asset

Typical approaches to Business Intelligence are no longer sufficient, especially for Business Process Management and Business Activity Monitoring where the goal is to drive the real-time enterprise

I completely agree with this sentiment. Traditional BI simply does not cut it when you are trying to drive insight into processes. You need intelligent business processes or BI 2.0 and you need to think about shifting your performance management into action.

Bottom line is, that in order to optimize the Event-Driven Enterprise, businesses must integrate a CEP engine with an online data platform to deliver real-time events across the enterprise, driving businesses to new levels of efficiency while enhancing the user experience.

I think SOA and EDA are very complementary and I highly recommend some of the analysts' discussions around Intelligent Process Automation.

One last note, remember that using rules to manage decisions is not the same as taking rules-driven approaches to CEP/BAM

Technorati Tags: analytics, business rules, CEP, complex event process, decision technology, EDA, enterprise decision management, event-driven architecture, SOA, EDM