EPTS looking at ROI
Posted by Paul Vincent
Opher Etzion recorded some action items for the Event Processing Technical Society at the EPTS5 symposium last week. One of these was “promotion of EPTS” as the go-to resource for event processing information (hence the irony that these action items are duly listed on Opher’s blog and not anywhere on the EPTS web site).
One of these was the idea of an ROI Working Group to share and propagate ROI stories (this being a safe activity for vendors to share as customers seeing ROI will not likely be poachable by other vendors!). But how should ROI be measured and reported?
Coincidentally a colleague just mentioned an airline customer who just went live with a new track-and-trace CEP application - an application with an estimated €2M per year payback.
Some observations here:
- This was an IT project completed during a big downswing in the airline industry, whilst many other conventional IT projects were being cancelled or postponed - but the ROI was compelling enough for this project to survive.
- The application used a distributed rule engine architecture, exploiting TIBCO BusinessEvents‘ agent-based architecture.
Another coincidence: I was just listening to Paul Coby, CIO of BA, talking about the need for lean and agile approaches in the airline industry, at IRMUK’s BPM2009. His message was ‘there are no IT projects, only business projects’ - all with business goals and KPIs to be measured. Model-driven CEP applications like the airline use case above certainly qualify as lean and agile… I wonder if BA is exploiting CEP like its competitors are?
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By Opher Etzion, September 30, 2009 @ 05:26
Hi Paul. These action items have been communicated to all EPTS members before putting on my Blog. I expect the people who will work on the EPTS awareness and promotion to reshape the EPTS website and communication processes with the rest of the universe.
cheers.
Opher
By Paul Vincent, September 30, 2009 @ 13:15
Thanks Opher - of course, but its still ironic…
Cheers
By Brian Connell, October 1, 2009 @ 04:28
I think it’s probably less “ironic”, and more to illustrate the fact that the EPTS doesn’t have a single channel to communicate with the outside world. It reinforces the need. Now, if Opher had posted after the workgroup had been accepted and started, that would be closer to “ironic”. Still, I’m glad that you managed to illustrate so clearly the dysfunctional nature of EPTS “marketing”.
By Brian Connell, October 1, 2009 @ 04:32
I’d also add, that the onus is on everybody to contribute to marketing and promotion of EP and EPTS. That means we need people to submit information, news, events, papers, etc, too. So if there’s any EP events that TIBCO are hosting, don’t forget to get it onto the http://www.ep-ts.com website also!
By Paul Vincent, October 1, 2009 @ 11:54
Hi Brian - well said. I think you already have the ORF, BRF and RuleML events up on the EPTS website.
Although I wrote the original comment tongue-in-cheek, I was a little disturbed to read http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/CEP-Interest/message/2136 and hear about Dieter’s resignation as co-chair of the EPTS UC WG. EPTS is a community and yes we should probably be doing more - one for the steering committee to guide on I suspect.
Cheers