There are a number of terms being bandied about at the moment, mostly by CEP vendors, to cover what is in effect “true business intelligence” at the (real-time) business operations level, as opposed to the “business reporting” that “BI” usually implies, useful for accounting reports and the like but not much else. I’ve seen Continuous Intelligence, Operational Intelligence, and a few others. Basically, these are all referring to the provision of:

• monitoring, and associated exception handling, of events associated with business operations, internal and external, IT system and manual
• short-term analytics, typically rule-based, to provide predictions for complex events that require some reaction by the business
• business decisions based on these business events, and the analysis of multiple such business events
• reporting via dashboards or other event mechanisms of the results of the above event processing

The identification of complex event (patterns) is therefore merely a part, albeit a critical one, in this “operational intelligence” process. Another key is that this process is event-driven, not just historical (ie database oriented).

Probably a differentiation between “OI” and “BI” is that OI is to do with day-to-day business operations (and tactics) whereas “BI” is more to do with business strategy guidance… although this might be moot, and simply a reflection that business strategy practices are a less developed art than business processes.

Notes:

Although the industry may be struggling to find a term that encompasses the business relevance of the technology that is complex event processing, the use of CEP in BAM has long been predicted - see this post by Alan Lundberg referencing the 2004 article “Why BAM Must Use CEP” by one Prof Luckham…

Index:

Past alphabet soups have compared CEP to (2) BI, (3) BAM, (4) BPM, (5) BPEL, (6) SOA, (7) SQL, (8) MDM, (9) ETL, and (10) EC2/Cloud.

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