« Decision Management - another way to get the business to care about SOA | Main | Using decision management to hang on to your customers »

March 04, 2008
Business rules, events and processes

My friend Paul Haley (now founder and president of Automata, Inc.) had an interesting post on event processing last week - CEP crossing the chasm into BPM by way of BRMS. Paul made a number of great points including that Business Process Management needs some event processing and that, typically, neither a Business Process Management System nor a Business Rules Management System are typically good at handling events. He also touched on what I consider the standard way in which these various technologies interact:

• Events happen and are detected
• Events are correlated to identify the fact that a more complex event, or a business event, has occurred
• These events cause a decision to be evaluated
• The decision may trigger other events or execute processes to respond to the event
• The whole is recursive with events, processes and decisions all potentially triggering each other

The current breed of CEP platforms tend to mix event stream processing (the ability to effectively process events as they arrive in a never-ending stream), event correlation (using rules and analytics, like decisioning, but with built-in capabilities for time-based and other event-centric functions) and decision-making. Some, as Paul notes, go as far as to have BPM built in.
The separation, however, is important when it comes to management. I am often asked how to decide which rules go in a process rather than being separated out into a decision. The answer is that rules tied to the structure of the process should go with it, those independent of the current process implementation (business rules) should go into a business rules management system and be managed to perform business decisions. Similarly rules that are about the correlation and transformation of events should be with the event handling infrastructure while those relating to decisions should be externalized and managed.
Rules are good for many things including event processing and business processes, as are analytics, but decisions should be managed separately from events and processes.
You can see more on my thoughts in More on rules and event processing, CEP - not just rules and Decision management is critical to event driven architecture

Posted by jtaylor in Business Process Management • Business Rules • Decision Technologies • Event Processing |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.ebizq.net/mt/mt-tb.cgi/3213

Comments

Posted by: Paul Vincent at March 5, 2008 02:56 PM

Post a comment

Name:

Email Address:

URL:
Remember Me? YesNo

Comments: (you may use HTML tags for style)

We ask that you type your code (displayed below) in the text box.This code is an image that cannot be read by a machine. It prevents automated programs from submitting comments.


Code: