BPM TT 08: CEP augmenting BPMS for agility
Posted by Paul Vincent
… was the catchy snappy hip punchy title of our contribution to this year’s BPM(I) (aka OMG) Think Tank 2008’s RoundTable sessions. These are used to get feedback from end-users, consultants and indeed other vendors on a variety of issues - which in this case was the role of Complex Event Processing and business events in BPM (aka BPMN models).
For a warm-up, Jim Sinur (Gartner) gave a keynote covering “The Economics of Business Process”, explaining that businesses should expect to invest in BPM in a down-economy as they have even more to gain than in an up-economy. More to the point, he expanded on the need to augment conventional BPM with things like decision management, rule-driven processes, complex event processing, and maybe even “scenario management” (which could mean any of case management, case-based reasoning, or test case generation - it wasn’t clear). In particular Jim mentioned:
- the role of complex events combined with AI techniques to improve decisions
- rules will need to “surround” process, not just be invoked from decision tasks
Jim was a good segue into the CEP-BPMS roundtable, whose participants included a large insurance company, a DOD supplier, a government agency, the co-creator of the BPMN modeling standard, and some curious fellow (BPM and EA) vendors.
Firstly, and not surprisingly, none of the participants disputed the value of CEP to business processes. There were a few different areas of CEP-BPM focus that were discussed:
- CEP providing a generic business-logic container for cross-process / cross-BPMS / cross-abstraction-level, system+process monitoring (a bit like TIBCO SPM provides, but more general)
- CEP was another reason for standardizing the enterprise view of events and event patterns alongside processes - as BPMN events provide a very process / task-oriented view of an event, which may have a totally different meaning in some other process (see also the OMG EMP effort for event metamodels, which hopefully EPTS will have an input to)
- Agility was provided by the CEP elements (like state models, declarative inference rules) being “easier to maintain” than (some) large process flows, as well as the fact that event-driven decisions are more useful in real-time scenarios where high responsiveness is required
- The use of rules, queries, states, alongside or augmenting process flows overlaps with “knowledge representation / management” (which is an interesting thought)
- CEP also had a BAM-type role to play in business process control and oversight: one participant used the terms “issue prevention, detection and correction”, which is a neat description.
The slides for the session (roundtable intro and feedback) are available in the file BPMI_EPandPRoundtableResults1008.pdf .
AI, BPM, Complex Event Processing (CEP), Meetings and events | 07 October 2008 |
8 Comments
Other Links to this Post
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BPM Think Tank 2008 — October 15, 2008 @ 13:54
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Complex Event Processing (CEP) Blog » Business Rules Forum 2008: Upper Ontology for Events, Processes, States, Rules — October 30, 2008 @ 01:40
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Complex Event Processing (CEP) Blog » BPMI TT EU 08: setting expectations for BPMN 3.0 — November 11, 2008 @ 13:54
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By Alex, October 8, 2008 @ 06:55
CEP + BPM is taking shape and it’s good to see work is beeing done by a number of players in that area.
One such player [[has integrated the Esper CEP engine since Sept this year]]. [[Product details removed]]
It is also interesting to note some posts from [[another open source BPM vendor]] about their CEP target that is in a roadmap stage.
(sorry for the plugs)
[[Edited to remove spam-like promotions of another CEP suppliers' partners, which is inappropiate for the TIBCO CEP blog!]]
By Alex, October 8, 2008 @ 07:00
I of course meant “provides COTS BPMS + CEP”
By vincent, October 8, 2008 @ 18:36
Hi Alex - thanks for pointing out that at least one small open source player is trying the combined approach. I guess I should have qualified with statements like “with deployed applications” etc (which may or may not be true for the vendor you mention). Mark Proctor at DROOLS is trying to build something similar. More power to them (and you)!
FYI I think we’ve had customers combining TIBCO iProcess with TIBCO BusinessEvents (which of course is a loose coupling) since, er, well a few years now anyway. I’ll have to check!
I’d fully expect some other CEP vendors to have deployments with BPM systems too - just none I’m particularly aware of, and probably not vendor-level relationships just yet. Although I fully expect a few BPMS vendors to eventually “kick the tyres” with some independent CEP vendor.
PS: sorry for the gross edit of your post, but it came across as excessive hype - which we try and keep to a minimum even on TIBCO products. (For example, count the references to TIBCO iProcess, iProcessConductor, and even TIBCO BusinessEvents in the above blog entry! )
By Alex, October 9, 2008 @ 00:07
No worries for the edits in my post - I was expecting it. I didn’t told the topic was newly addressed. f.e. Forrester wrote in 2006 “Remember that a BPMS must serve as the foundation for BEM or CEP capability” (see http://www.forrester.com/Events/Content/0,5180,1396,00.ppt)
and pointed out that CEP was a natural feature to be added in a BPMS for the next generation t o come.
I have no doubt Tibco has deployments on such a use case thru tailored, project by project, custom assembly of multiple products (yours or not), but I find it quite interesting that some actors are going after this approach in a more integrated way thru a single runtime approach.
By vincent, October 9, 2008 @ 13:02
Thanks Alex - the Forrester PPT seems to take quite a holistic view of BPM - as in “everything can be called BPM”. TIBCO’s version is “BPM+”, but even we don’t claim that the source of all events is some other business process
I suspect they have a different view now.
On the single run-time: I guess that depends on your perspective. We have some customers using TIBCO BusinessEvents for process execution including workflows (indeed we use BE as our own state + workflow manager for decision management). However, we don’t *claim* that BE is a jack-of-all-trades system…
Cheers