James Taylor's Decision Management

I saw this article What is Event Driven Architecture (EDA) and Why Does it Matter? over on Complex Event Processing. It's a great overview of what it means to have an event driven architecture. It talks about EDA combining an architecture "centered on an asynchronous 'push'- based communication model" and the idea of sense and respond or "the ability to respond rapidly and effectively to changing conditions". Regular readers will know that I think being event-driven means being decision-centric and that I blog alot about this topic (for instance, I blogged about a David Luckham article on the same site last week here). This idea that an event-driven architecture is more than a technology stack and includes a focus on sense-and-respond is critical, I think. It is also why I think decision management plays such an important role here - if your systems cannot decide how to respond when you sense something, what are you going to do? Wait for a person? No, clearly the systems must make these decisions and the reality is that decisions are different - the right decision changes constantly (forcing you to build very agile decision services) and you must be able to predict the future (at some level) to make good decisions (forcing a focus on predictive analytics).

If you are interested in this topic, Jan Vanthienen and Wilfreid Lemahieu gave a great session at the European Business Rules Conference and this post by Jack van Hoof on EDA and SOA in combination is highly recommended. Those of you thinking about how an event-driven architecture fits with business process management might like this post (on my other blog) on the role of decisions when integrating business intelligence, business process and business rules.

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