vincent
02-02-2009 02:00 PM
Jim Sinur at Gartner has just commented on the need for BPM (or at least, “business processes”) to handle more sophisticated decisions based on rules, analytics and events, and this is expanded by James Taylor who blogs that the central thread is the “decision”, as this also links events to processes.

A few observations, though:



- Business rules are inherantly related to events:* rules need to be inspected when some fact changes where the rule depends on / is related to that fact (i.e. the fact is in the condition-part of the rule), and that rule is enforced. Facts change when events occur.
E.g. “If a customer’s orders exceed $1M (in any 12 month period) then customer is flagged as a priority customer (for the next 6 months)”
This is driven by “customer order” events and uses the aggregate order data. And maybe a time event indicating that 6 months after such a decision is a good time to check if the customer status needs to revert. In other words, events drive business rules!

- Business decisions are a particular type of operational rule, typically resulting in deciding on a process path to take or invoke (as James says), or possibly just updating some fact.
E.g. “If a customer’s orders exceed $1M (in any 12 month period) then customer is flagged as a priority customer (for the next 6 months)”
This deciding some fact or knowledge about the customer, but some other decision rule may have do some related actions.
E.g. “If 4 weeks before Christmas then send priority customers appropriate corporate greetings card”
In this case the event is calendar-based, and hopefuly the action has been planned in advance! But the main point here is that decisions do not necessarily result in actions.

If you consider Complex Event Processing to be just a type of automated process that serves the business by identifying complex events (i.e. instances of event patterns) for other business processes to use, then the role of”business decisions” is critical to successful business event processing. For example, the (CEP) process may decide (decision) that some trend in current events indicates a new fraud pattern is occuring, and requires monitoring (CEP) and eventual action (BPM workflow action).

Basically, both Jim and James are thinking along the right lines, even if they viewing IT from particular (”BPM” and “decisions” respectively) angles… these different angles are all in the process of adapting and exploiting other software areas (like CEP and analytics) as they evolve. And likewise for “CEP”, of course…



Source...