James Taylor's Decision Management

I promise this will be the last post on event processing for a while but Tim Bass posted a comment to me and this post on this blog - Bending CEP for Rules. Tim was making the point that CEP is not just business rules plus an event-driven architecture. While he is correct, I think he may have slightly missed the point I was trying to make. This could, of course, be my fault for failing to explain. So here goes:

While the use of business rules, and indeed predictive analytics, might well be an ideal platform for complex event processing or CEP, this is not the same as using those technologies to manage decisions. Decisions that a particular combination of events from the "event cloud" is significant is a CEP decision and might be best implemented in a technology that understands more about events and that can do event stream processing - a true CEP engine, perhaps. However, deciding what to do as a result, assuming that this decision is more complex than simply punting to a person and hoping for the best, is about business decision-making and managing these decisions is my focus. Business rules represent a great platform for managing decisions and more complex decisions, or more precision in decision-making, typically require both a business rules platform and the use of executable analytics to turn uncertainty into proability. It is also true that an event-processing decision might involve knowing, for instance, that a customer involved in the events is a valuable one. This component decision - is this customer a valuable one - is also a business decision and should be managed as such separately from the need to use the decision as part of deciding how to process an event. All of this means that while business decision automation is not the same as complex event processing, the two approaches are complimentary and rely on similar technological approaches.

I wrote a post on the alphabet soup in this area and this one on why SOA, EDA, BPM and CEP are all Complementary - and need decisions. Paul Vincent had this nice one on the differences between a BRE and a rule-driven CEP engine  and this post over on my other blog - Business Rules, Business Decisions, Intelligent Processes, Enterprise Decision Management - tried to pull a few of these threads together.

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