What is the difference between a business transaction and an event?
It depends on your perspective, but there really is no difference, according to Roy Schulte, distinguished analyst for Gartner. "An entire business process instance may be known to a BPM person as a transaction, but would be known to an event processing person as a business event."
Why is this important? Because businesses are increasingly looking to event processing to guide their decision making, and this calls for a robust BPM strategy.
I recently had the opportunity to join Roy and Oracle's Maneesh Joshi in a new ebizQ Webcast on the business value of event processing, and the growing role of continuous intelligence.
Roy pointed out that within a BPM-enabled environment, focused on workflow, orchestration, and rules, events take the form of steps within business processes. "A business process.. will be started by an event, something happening in the real world that will trigger the execution of the first step in the business process." Events may also trigger other steps along the way within the process, he adds.
But he wanted to make it clear that these are the same things to both BPM and event managers. "Whether you look at an event process from a BPM point of view or event point of view -- in many cases it depends on your background and what you're most familiar with -- but you are describing the same thing. This doesn't mean that all business processes use events in the same way. Some business processes make use of event driven architecture and event objects in different ways."
Roy is co-author of a new book on event processing, titled "Event Processing: Designing IT Systems for Agile Companies," with Dr. K. Mani Chandy, Simon Ramo Professor of Computer Science at the California Institute of Technology,
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