What can bowling teach us about event processing?
Yesterday, I had the opportunity to join the ebizQ team in New Rochelle, NY for their annual summer shindig. It was great to meet -- and a privilege to work with -- such a fine and knowledgeable bunch.
Part the day's events took place at a nearby bowling alley. I did manage to hit a few pins here and there. Let's just say I'm a slightly better bowler than Barack Obama (he famously bowled a 37) and leave it at that.
In fact, it's been so long since I picked up a bowling ball that it was amazing to see how automated the alleys had become. Instead of the weird math you needed to do when fowarding the score to the next column, the software takes care of that for you.
Actually, you can't say the whole thing is entirely automated, however -- there was still a lot of manual intervention required to keep the process moving. The pins kept getting stuck, and the reset screen kept freezing up. We kept the bowling alley staff busy constantly coming over to reset both the screens and the pins.
Which just goes to show you, no matter how much automation you think you have introduced into a process, there will always be glitchy software, exceptions, and a need for human intervention. Event processing is about automation; event processing is about people. The two are not, nor will they ever be, mutually exclusive.
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