Mike Gilpin had an interesting post on the Forrester blog this week - The Four Classical Elements Of The Digital World: Process, Service, Event, and Information. You should take a look at the post - it's an article really - as Mike makes some great points about the interconnectedness of all things in application development. I am particularly interested in this as Mike has invited me to attend the Forrester IT Forum in Las Vegas in a couple of weeks where I will be participating in a few things and blogging about the experience over on the Smart (enough) Systems blog - you can subscribe to get the blog posts from the event as I write them.
To keep you going though, I would make a couple of quick observations around decision management and Mike's ideas. Firstly, considering the digital business architecture he references, one can and should clearly regard the logic of decisions, and the models of analytically derived information, as part of the metadata core. Secondly I see decision services as a subset of all services. Decision services provide decision making to processes, decide how to act on events, and decide using information. In this sense they are the subset of services that, perhaps, most embodies the interconnectedness Mike discusses.
I wrote before on the role of business rules in building a digital business architecture.

Posted by jtaylor in Business Process Management • Decision Technologies • Event Processing • SOA | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I thought it would be fun to highlight my 20 most popular posts from the last couple of years so here goes:

1. Keeping Predictive Analytics and BI on separate tracks
   
2. If IT wants to alter outcomes, it needs to automate decisions
   
3. Business rules, events and processes
   
4. Getting a competitive advantage from your data
   
5. Achieving Agility - some notes after Gartner
   
6. Introducing business decision management
   
7. Here's a way to put analytic solutions in the driving seat
   
8. Decision Technologies and Active Data Warehousing
   
9. SOA and Business Rules, perfect together
   
10. Business rules, routing rules, event rules
    
11. Decision Services
    
12. Decision management is critical to event driven architecture
    
13. Decision Management - another way to get the business to care about SOA
    
14. Marketing Analytics in a Post-Web 2.0 World
    
15. Little known ways to improve customer experience
    
16. More on rules and event processing
    
17. Business rules, desktops and knowledge buses
    
18. If dashboards are the end game, kill me now...
    
19. COBIT, SOX, compliance and business rules
    
20. Call for Presentations - the new EDM Summit
    

Posted by jtaylor in Business Activity Monitoring • Business Agility • Business Intelligence • Business Process Management • Business Process Outsourcing • Business Rules • Compliance • Decision Technologies • Event Processing • Innovation • Legacy Modernization • Predictive Analytics • Requirements • SOA | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• How are you integrating business rules and analytics?
• How are you adding intelligence to your business processes?
• How are you putting analytics to work in your operational systems?
• How, in other words, are you using Enterprise Decision Management (EDM) to innovate your business? Your colleagues and peers want to know.

We invite you to present at the Enterprise Decision Management (EDM) Summit OCTOBER 26-30, 2008 -- ORLANDO, FL  

Join us this year to share how the technologies and approaches of Enterprise Decision Management (EDM) have helped your organization deliver agility while managing risk, focusing on customers, or demonstrating compliance. Whether you call this Business Decision Management or Customer Decision Management or just Decision Management, we want to hear from you. The EDM Summit brings together managers, practitioners and vendors to talk about what works and to provide attendees with a host of practical ideas they can put to use in their own companies. These practical ideas don’t come from us, they come from you.

Most of all, we want real-life case studies. We want to hear what really happened, what worked and what did not, from the actual people who undertook them. Whether you want to show how you got started or how you have learned from experience, whether you want to talk about technology, people or methodology we want real-life cases. If you are a consultant or vendor, the best way to be accepted is to co-present with someone from your client’s organization. Real experience, not company positioning or marketing buzzwords, is what it takes to be selected.

Particular areas of interest include, but are not limited to ...

• Using decision services with BPM or SOA to put intelligence into composite applications
• Using business rules and analytics or data mining in combination
• Implementing adaptive control and champion/challenger testing
• The impact of the technologies and approaches of EDM on the software development life cycle

 Your presentation ideas are welcome in any of our mainstay topic areas, including ...

• Business Rule Management Systems and Engines
• Data Mining and Predictive Analytics Technologies
• Techniques and Methodologies for Data Mining and Predictive Analytics
• Decision Services, Business Rules and SOA
• Adaptive Control and Optimization
• Managing Decisions in BPM and SOA
• Moving to BI 2.0 / Operational BI
  
• Event-based Decision Management
• Compliance and Risk Management
• Organizational Change

Not on the list? Tell us about your own unique ideas! Top architect at a mainstream software vendor? Creator of a highly innovative product? We will consider your presentation for our Chief Architect's track. Highly selective. 

We Want to Hear from You ...

We welcome presentation ideas from all! Do you have a business success story? Best practices about how to use decision management technology? Significant progress in applying data mining to operational systems? EDM Summit is THE place to present on experience, proven solutions and new innovations in this exciting area. We bring together companies and experts from diverse industries in a unique and exciting venue to share their experiences. Do you know qualified colleagues who would make great Forum speakers? Click here to forward this message to a friend. Invite them to submit their Presentation Abstract for consideration!

CALL FOR PRESENTATIONS SUBMISSION DEADLINE: March 31, 2008  

To submit your presentation idea ...
Step 1. Please read the Speaker Agreement carefully.

Step 2. Complete the Speaker Abstract Submission Form.
Presenters will receive a full complimentary registration to the Business Rules Forum, including the two co-located conferences Enterprise Decision Management (EDM) Summit and Rules Technology Summit as well as to RulesExpo.

Got a question? Please email us at speakerinfo@businessrulesforum.com 

Posted by jtaylor in Business Activity Monitoring • Business Agility • Business Intelligence • Business Process Management • Business Rules • Compliance • Decision Technologies • Event Processing • Predictive Analytics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Posted by jtaylor in Business Process Management • Business Rules • Decision Technologies • Event Processing | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Opher Etzion had a nice post today - More thoughts on Rules in the context of Event Processing - in which he discussed different ways in which rules apply to event processing. He identifies 5 different areas in which rules can be used as part of an event processing approach and, in the process, reiterates something I often find I have to explain to people. Just because a product or approach uses "rules" (declarative statements of intent) does not mean that it is all you need to take a rules-based or decision-centric approach. In particular I like the fact that he drew a distinction between routing/transformation/validation/orchestration of events and "Intelligent Event Processing." It is this last that is the realm of enterprise decision management and where a coordinated approach to managing of decisions, typically using both business rules and predictive analytics, really pays off. These decisions are typically business decisions that are not tightly coupled to the specifics of your current systems or low-level events. While a business rules management system might well be useful for managing all the rules involved in event processing, probably it makes more sense to manage those rules tightly coupled to the definitions of events in the event processing environment. Once you get into broader business or enterprise decisions, then you need to think about managing those decisions so that they are not so tied to a particular architecture.
Some other posts you might find useful on this blog:

• Complex Event Processing - not just rules
• Decision management is critical to event driven architecture
• Predictive analytics go deeper
• Business rules, routing rules, event rules

Posted by jtaylor in Business Rules • Decision Technologies • Event Processing • Predictive Analytics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Mike Kavitz had an interesting post today - Transforming the business with BPM and SOA - and it made me wonder what collection of approaches you really need to transform a business. While experts, and I can be guilty of this too, like to push their own approach "just do what I say and you will be a success", the reality is that many things contribute to truly transforming a business. Mike correctly identifies a couple of them but I would add a few (using their most common names):

• Business Process Management (BPM)
  Allowing the business to participate and even own, for the first time, the definition of how their information systems support their business is clearly transformative.
• Enterprise Decision Management (EDM)
  Automating and improving the operational decisions within these systems and processes to ensure precision, agility and consistency changes the role of front line staff, turns better data into better actions and thus outcomes, and empowers executives to change the way their organization acts. I think that counts as transformative.
• Complex Event Processing (CEP)
  The ability to move to event-driven approaches instead of process-centric or batch-oriented responses is a key component for a real-time enterprise. Complementing and complemented by BPM and EDM, CEP gets the nod for enabling this change of mindset.
• Corporate Performance Management (CPM)
  You can't manage what you can't measure and performance management is how you measure the success or failure of different process designs, event responses or decision strategies.
• Business Activity Monitoring (BAM)
  Closely related to CPM, BAM is about pushing the results of this monitoring to the people who need to act. Combined with automating responses where possible and managing the processes that handle these responses, BAM can truly make a difference.
• Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
  Underpinning all of these, a focus on reusable, coherent, composable, well defined services instead of large, monolithic applications.

Posted by jtaylor in Business Activity Monitoring • Business Process Management • Business Rules • Decision Technologies • Event Processing • Predictive Analytics • SOA | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Sandy Kemsley had a series of interesting posts from the recent Gartner BPM summit. Two caught my eye especially. This one about a Bill Gassman session and this one about a Janelle Hill one. Both of them made me think about straight through processing or "hands free" or "lights out" or whatever you call it. Bill's session talked about reducing the "latency between events and actions" and emphasized business activity monitoring (BAM) as a solution. Janelle meanwhile implied that a focus on effective processes not just efficient ones meant that the focus in business process management (BPM) was no longer on straight through processing (STP) but on collaboration and softer aspect of processes. Both sessions to me pointed out a basic problem with the definition of straight through processing. If you are using BAM to get actions taken in response to events or just using a BPM tool to automate processes, then you are not doing STP for real.

Real STP means no manual intervention for the vast majority of transactions - say 90-95%. It means automated responses to events that should trigger processes or actions. It means handling these transactions as well if not better than a person would, not simply automating it in a "dumb" way. This means people cannot be required to respond to time-critical events and that processes must have access to sophisticated decision-making so that they don't have to refer something to a person or make dangerously over-simplified assumptions about how customers or transactions should be handled. This kind of real STP requires a focus on decision automation and decision management, not just on event or process management.

Janelle identified six types of process, similar to the three types IDC talk about, and these seem to boil down to event centric, people centric (or unstructured) and transactional. There is a role for decision services in all of them. In event-centric ones, a decision service can ensure that the right process is started or right action is taken. In transactional ones, decision services can increase the rate of STP while also improving the quality of decision making and maintaining agility (as defined by Gartner and discussed by me here). In people-centric processes, decision services can guide and direct, refer and route according to complex rules and analytics. Indeed this kind of automated decisioning is at the heart of many kinds of solutions and neglecting it while consider BAM or BPM is a bad idea.

[Sorry for the pause in blogging, back now]

Technorati Tags: BAM, BPM, business activity monitoring, business process management, Column 2, decision service, Gartner, IDC, Sandy Kemsley, STP, straight through processing, event processing

Posted by jtaylor in Business Activity Monitoring • Business Agility • Business Process Management • Decision Technologies • Event Processing | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Technorati Tags: analytics, automated decision making, BAM, business rules, CEP, complex event processing, David Luckham, decision automation, decision management, EDA, EDM, enterprise decision management, event-driven architecture, predictive analytics

Posted by jtaylor in Business Activity Monitoring • Business Rules • Decision Technologies • Event Processing • Predictive Analytics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Technorati Tags: agility, analytics, business agility, business rules, CEP, David Luckham, decision management, decision service, EBRC, EDA, European Business Rules Conference, event-driven architecture, predictive analytics, complex event processing

Posted by jtaylor in Business Rules • Decision Technologies • Event Processing • Predictive Analytics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I saw this paper by David Luckham a couple of days ago - SOA, EDA, BPM and CEP are all Complementary. He has a nice example process that he uses (which you should read before continuing). In this example he has two services, "risk assessment" and "funding" that are both decision services.

Interestingly, considering the risk assessment as a decision helps as it makes it clear that running the three sub-processes in parallel (income review, credit check and house appraisal) before doing risk assessment may be inefficient as the result of one or more of those sub-processes might not actually impact the decision at all. If we move to an event-based approach the power of this is even clearer. The risk assessment can be performed after the receipt of each event and can see if the information collected so far is enough to make a decision. If, say, a house appraisal, will make no difference then the decision service can issue the event that will trigger funding without waiting and issue a cancellation for the appraisal saving time and money. Clearly an SLA can be considered as part of this and the decision made without something if waiting is going to break the SLA (or worse yet regulations mandating processing time). It also shows how a custom decision service can make a fairly standard process (even an outsourced one) seem different as I discussed in this article. A different approach to risk assessment, and a different risk decision, will result in a different treatment for the customer even if all the process components are the same.

I have blogged before about this alphabet soup post and this one on decisioning in a loosely-coupled process and if this is a topic that interests you, would suggest this post on Business Rules, Business Decisions, Intelligent Processes, Enterprise Decision Management too.

Technorati Tags: BPM, business agility, business process, business rules, CEP, decision automation, decision service, EDA, EDM, enterprise decision management, event-driven architecture, service-oriented architecture, SOA, David Luckham

Posted by jtaylor in Business Process Management • Business Rules • Decision Technologies • Event Processing • SOA | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Jack van Hoof had a great article today - How to implement a loosely coupled process flow (EDA). A great illustration of how to use a decision service to loosely couple. I have blogged about SOA/EDA and EDM before and there was a great session at EBRC on this topic. I think being event-driven and decision-centric is important in the world in which we find ourselves and that decisions can be the glue between services, events, processes and legacy applications. If you are not already subscribed to Jack's blog, you should be. He's worth reading.

Apologies for cross-posting.

Technorati Tags: business rules, CEP, decision service, EDA, SOA

Posted by jtaylor in Business Rules • Event Processing • SOA | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Technorati Tags: business rules, CEP, decision service

Posted by jtaylor in Business Rules • Event Processing | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Saw this press release talking about integration between Progress' Sonic Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and Lombardi's Business Process Management System (BPMS). This strikes me as an interesting development as I believe that Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), BPM and Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) are all going to have to converge to provide a platform for the kind of systems being built going forward. Indeed, Maureen Fleming is quoted in the release and I think she has a nice view of how all this fits together (described in this blog post). While combining BPM, SOA, ESB, EDA etc does result in a kind of alphabet soup, I do think it is worth continuing to think about these technologies as a set. I see a need for a decision layer in all this but decision services, like many kinds of services, can be useful in SOA and EDA as well as in BPM.

Interestingly I just blogged about a piece of AMR Research on SOA and BPM for Enterprise Applications over on my other blog and they had some discussion of ESB support in SOA frameworks (many of which also had BPM support). While I am not sure that I would just lump ESBs in the Execution category (as they did), I do think we will see stronger support for ESB functionality (and indeed event processing and correlation) in BPM products either explicitly (as webMethods and Tibco have done) or through partnerships like this one between Lombardi and Progress.

Technorati Tags: BPM, business process, decision service, EDA, ESB, event-driven architecture, service-oriented architecture, SOA, enterprise service bus

Posted by jtaylor in Business Process Management • Business Rules • Decision Technologies • Event Processing • SOA | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Michael Dortch blogged a post over on the BI in Action blog today - BI, BPM, and SOA: Alphabet Soup that's GOOD for You! Inspired by his comments I thought I would see how many TLAs I could get in a title while still writing a coherent post. I managed 9 (yes, I know, BI is not a TLA technically but whatever):

• BPM or Business Process Management is about defining, managing and controlling the business processes that underpin your business
• BPO or Business Process Outsourcing is about contracting with someone else to run one of these business processes for you
• BI or Business Intelligence is about understanding your business by analyzing the data you have
• CPM or Corporate Performance Management (sometimes called Business Performance Management) is about monitoring the results your business is achieving through analyzing the data you collect
• SOA or Service-Oriented Architecture is an approach to building an application architecture from loosely-coupled component services
• EDA or Event-Driven Architecture uses events and the responses systems take to these events as the primary organizing principle of systems
• CEP or Complex Event Processing involves correlating many events, often related to different business processes, and then automating an appropriate response to these events
• BAM or Business Activity Monitoring alerts businesses to problems, issues, goals met or other indicators of how well a process is executing, typically in real-time

So now all I have to do, having ransacked Wikipedia for definitions, is tie all this together

• If you automate a business process with BPM, how do you get straight-through processing if people must make all the decisions?
• If you outsource a process with BPO, how do you keep control of the critical decisions in that process?
• If your BI systems tell you what worked in the past, how do you apply that to decisions you will take in the future?
• If your CPM environment tells you something is going wrong, what decisions can you take to respond?
• If you are using SOA to be more agile, what happens when a service makes decisions that must change often?
• In your EDA, are you just going to tell people to act or are your systems going to take a decision to act in response to an event?
• Once you have correlated your events in your CEP system, how do you decide what should be done?
• When your BAM dashboard tells a manager you have hit a goal, they can change their decisions but how do they change the decisions taken by their systems?

Decisions, decisions, decisions. And that brings us to the 9th TLA - EDM or Enterprise Decision Management. Enterprise decision management, or decision management, is an approach for managing and improving decisions. It involves separating out the operational decisions in your environment, automating them using business rules and predictive analytics, and then managing and adapting them over time to ensure they reflect changing conditions. As you would expect, these are topics I have written about a lot. You might start with this post on decision services as they are key to embedding automated decisions in your application architecture. Regardless of where you stand on SOA and EDA you should check out this post on SOA and EDA and why decisioning complements both and this one on reasons to automate decisions when adopting SOA. I also wrote this article on rules and SOA and this post on being event-driven and decision-centric. There's a fair bit on the blog about the intersection of BPM and BI and I wrote this article on how business rules can be a platform for bringing BI to bear on BPM. I have blogged about why rules are needed in CEP and on how decisioning complements BAM as well as this article on shifting your CPM into action. There some stuff on how rules and decisioning can make BPO work better and some of this is summarized in this post about driving overall agility. There's also a lot more on these topics and others on my other blog, www.edmblog.com, to which you can subscribe here.

Phew. I am worn out by all these acronyms.

Technorati Tags: adaptive control, automated decision making, BAM, BI, BPM, BPO, business process, business process outsourcing, business rules, CEP, decision automation, decision service, EDA, EDM, enterprise decision management, event-driven architecture, predictive analytics, SOA, service-oriented architecture

Posted by jtaylor in Business Activity Monitoring • Business Agility • Business Intelligence • Business Process Management • Business Process Outsourcing • Business Rules • Decision Technologies • Event Processing • Predictive Analytics • SOA | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

<shameless commerce>

As some of you know by now I have been working, with Neil Raden, on a new book. As the files shipped to the printers today I thought I would take the opportunity to shamelessly plug the book here on the blog. The book's premise is that much of today's existing technology has the potential to be "smart enough" to make a big difference to your organization's business and that current business trends are forcing you to build smarter systems. Like this blog, the book discusses how focusing on decisions as distinct opportunities for improvement, you can use established technologies in a new way to solve problems and create competitive advantage.

You can pre-order it here from Prentice Hall (there is even a blog discount coupon code TAYLOR7962) or from amazon.com here (amazon.com has not yet decided what price it will charge).

The book has a companion site too - http://www.smartenoughsystems.com where you can subscribe to news about the book/authors and read the testimonials we got. Over time we will add more useful links to the site.

If you are not yet convinced that you need to read the book, why not try the digital shortcut "Why you Need Smart Enough Systems". You can buy it online from Prentice Hall  for less than $5! If you need to be convinced that you need to use decision management to make your systems smart enough to be useful (or if you have colleagues or customers who don't understand why they should apply the techniques we talk about on the blog), you will find this a good read.

</shameless commerce>

Technorati Tags: adaptive control, business rules, data mining, decision, decision automation, decision service, decision service, EDM, enterprise decision management, optimization, predictive analytics, Smart (Enough) Systems, smartenoughsystems

Posted by jtaylor in Business Activity Monitoring • Business Agility • Business Intelligence • Business Process Management • Business Process Outsourcing • Business Rules • Compliance • Decision Technologies • Event Processing • Innovation • Legacy Modernization • Predictive Analytics • SOA | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My old buddy Paul Vincent posted this article - CEP and the alphabet soup (Part 2): BI - and I wanted to comment on it. Of course Tibco does not really understand blogs and so allows no comments or trackbacks but the article was good enough to write about anyway. Paul does a nice job of showing how BI is different in a Complex Event Processing (CEP) world. I still think that there is a difference between rules that drive CEP and rules that drive decisions (and decision services) and that CEP requires both kinds of rules (or here). I also think Paul could have brought up the issue of turning data into predictive analytics and how that can affect both the way CEP works and the decisions triggered by it. I summarized some issues around event processing here.

Note to anyone reading from Tibco, not allowing comments or trackbacks is a really dumb strategy. Really.

Technorati Tags: BAM, CEP, decision service, EDM, enterprise decision management, predictive analytics

Posted by jtaylor in Business Rules • Decision Technologies • Event Processing | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Maureen Fleming of IDC gave an interesting presentation in San Mateo last week - A view of BPM in 2007 and beyond. It's a great presentation and two things in particular struck me and prompted a post - her use of decision services and her categorization of BPM tools. Based on her presentation I developed a slightly different diagram (shown below).

Maureen categorized BPM into Sense and Respond, People-Centric and Transaction-Centric (the gray boxes in the diagram) and talked about how these are conceptually linked with Sense and Respond triggering People-Centric for investigation and Transaction-Centric for automation while Transaction-Centric trigger People-Centric for exception handling (these links shown with curved arrows). Maureen went on to talk about using an ESB to hook all this up and the role of event processing, activity monitoring and process analytics in all this. I would add the important role that Decision Services play in this kind of setup. Providing answers to questions raised by other elements, they can be easily integrated into the ESB as shown in the diagram.

I have written before about SOA, BPM, CEP and business rules and why business rules matter in an event-driven SOA. Keeping decisions, and rules, separate like this helps avoid over-synchronizing rules and processes and is not the same as the use of rules technology in BPM (or BAM or CEP).

If you are interested you might enjoy this podcast from the bloggers here at ebizQ on BPM in 2007 and this post on intelligent process automation

BTW Bruce Silver's great article on this topic in Intelligent Enterprise is here: Analysis: Where Rules Management and BPM Meet

Technorati Tags: BAM, BPM, business process, business rules, CEP, decision service, forrester, SOA

Posted by jtaylor in Business Activity Monitoring • Business Process Management • Business Rules • Decision Technologies • Event Processing • SOA | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I was reading this article on Your BPM-Enabled SOA by Michael Scheible, BPM Development Leader in IBM's WebSphere group. As it was talking about the intersection of BPM and SOA I thought it would be worth highlighting a few things:

• I think you need to consider events, BPM and SOA together - check out this post on event-driven issues (and especially this great article)
• One of the critical kinds of services that you need to deliver on real process automation is decision services
• It is important that decisions are part of your mental model of rules in BPM
• I think rules and BPM will come together in 2007

Technorati Tags: bpm, decision service, EDA, event-driven architecture, SOA, business process management

Posted by jtaylor in Business Process Management • Business Rules • Event Processing • SOA | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Steve Jones had this post on SOA v EDA while David Luckham posted on why SOA, EDA, BPM and CEP are all complementary. I think these two have it right - SOA and EDA are complimentary as are EDA and BPM. They represent different ways to bring services (components) together to solve business problems. I would go further and say that decision services are the right way to bring rules into SOA. I have blogged before about SOA, BPM, CEP and business rules and why business rules matter in an event-driven SOA. I think event driven design is particularly suitable for what I call transaction-centric decisioning too and that's a good thing.

I also recommend two articles in SOA magazine - this one on business rules in SOA and this one on SOA and EDA.

Technorati Tags: business rules, CEP, complex event process, decision technology, EDA, event-driven architecture, SOA, decision service

Posted by jtaylor in Business Activity Monitoring • Business Process Management • Business Rules • Decision Technologies • Event Processing • SOA | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Posted by jtaylor in Business Activity Monitoring • Business Rules • Decision Technologies • Event Processing | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Roeland Loggen posted a comment on my post "Predictive Analytics go deeper" about predictive BPM. It seems to me that there is a difference between predicting process execution and predicting effectiveness of decisions so as to control process execution. While it is useful to be able to predict process execution patterns, such as coming workload, it seems to me that it would also be useful to be able to predict the consequences of actions that affect the process. For instance, if I could predict the risk of something I might process "high risk" transactions differently. I have discussed this in a post about two analyst posts on "intelligent process automation" and "when rules go inside-out". I also blogged about turning transactions into decisions and previously on how my opinions on intelligent processes differ from some other "BI 2.0" ones.

Posted by jtaylor in Business Process Management • Event Processing • Predictive Analytics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I saw this interesting article today (on ebizQ) by John Senor - Business Intelligence Goes Deep. John starts off making some good points. He says that you need "enhanced business intelligence at the deepest level - embedded within essential business processes" and that "business interaction is about events that occur and how businesses respond to such events" given that those events "can trigger different responses that involve intelligent decision making". Absolutely. He goes on to say that for "process-driven BI, decision making is a fundamental aspect of any operational business process". And he's right about that too. I'm agreeing with so much of the article at this point that I could have written it myself! But then he loses me...

Discussing what events can cause processes to do, he discusses Alerts, Analytics, Data Visualization and Reporting. I'm a little worried now - after all decisions should result in ACTIONS not these other things. And then I notice that everyone of t