Having sufficiently had a chance to recover from a very busy and very engaging TUCON TIBCO 2010 user conference in Las Vegas, I wanted to pass along a few observations and notes from my track this year which was the Optimization and Visibility track.  This was a very full 2 days of mostly CEP customer presentations with a smattering of industry IT analysts and TIBCO engineering presentations thrown in for good measure.

I’ll include this as a series and cover one presentation at a time.

First up is PepsiCo, co-presented with their implementation partner, Infosys.

The use case was how PepsiCo uses CEP software to provide more efficient and cost-effective usage of their company transportation fleet and other dedicated transportation partners.

In specific, they wanted to use their CEP software to provide advice on when to use their own transportation fleet, or use another carrier for consumer product shipments all over the U.S.  Previously, Pepsi was using a manual, labor intensive process to manage the process.

In researching this project it was decided that they needed to be able to dynamically deploy their policies (or business rules), and automatically create decision trees to reflect the changing dynamics and costs of the transportation industry, they needed real time information on truck locations and cost valuations, and to capture metrics for performance measurement.

They also covered the architecture and design of their deployed system which was implemented with the Pepsi IT team and Infosys.  He explained how they were able to develop simple and timed events to automate and manage the business rules with the TIBCO rule authoring tool, deploy customized and re-usable processes to extract data from a 3rd Party tool at regular intervals and provide enhanced performance by querying large amount of data as subsets and utilizing XSL and XPATH capabilities within the TIBCO software.

They also wanted to provide the ability to correlate events or create alerts based on events. He described it as “managing their company transportation events”

Example: If xx# errors occur in an hour, then send email to baseline support.

Example: If the Dedicated Fleet carrier has not reviewed their trip within 2 hours of offering, alert the Network Coordinator.

They also covered their business benefits– which included the ability to strategically identify the placement of dedicated and company fleet capacity, scale their fleet best practices nationally, and provide an agile software platform that gives them the flexibility to adapt to change via business rules that require minimum to no code change.

Key learnings from their project included his observation that they were glad they involved the business side early in the project in defining business rules, actions and data elements. PepsiCo also chose to build this CEP solution using iterative methodology principles to in order to keep the business side engaged throughout the project, specifically in the area of User Interface and Rule Authoring.

One of the speakers also covered ROI and payback– but we were sworn to secrecy.

In general, it was a well received presentation by the packed room.

But what I really liked about this particular session was that it presented by the guys who were directly involved and it was to Infosys’ credit that they let the Pepsi guys (and the project’s) success speak for itself.

CEP applications are often touted as to be so cutting edge and revolutionary, but it’s applications such as these “bread and butter” projects that seems to have made a difference in their everyday company operations and sometimes it’s those applications that turn out to be the most important of all.

More customer presentations later …

There is an EU Project proposal to look at Event-driven Business Process Management, and that drove the title and interest in this panel (following neatly on from the edBPM09 workshop a few weeks back) chaired by CITT’s Rainer von Ammon.

The brief for the panel was to cover particular aspects of  “edBPM” such as:

• What is meant by edBPM? Compared with, for example, the “edBPM  Reference Model” presented at the 1st EPTS symposium in 2006?
  • TIBCO of course talks about “edBPM” as either a part of “BPM+” (from a BPM perspective) or as automated rule- and event-driven processes (from a CEP perspective). Either way, customers regularly combine complex event processing and (orchestrated, BPMN-based) workflow as well as (orchestrated, XML processing) SOA.
  • The main issues with the supplied edBPM model was that it simply combined event processing with BPEL processes. TIBCO’s edBPM customers invariably never use BPEL (why should they?), and indeed some don’t use BPMN for process models (defining models in terms of states and rules). So the main suggestion here is to go up a level in abstraction:
    • Multiple engines (that could include BPEL if you were so hindered inclined) as well as event processing algorithms or even analytics.
    • An event server (or bus).
    • Some kind of generic state store (for process states, persisted events, etc).
    • More generic models (for business control) and dashboards (cockpit or otherwise).
• Who will be the first “market mover” in exploiting the term “edBPM”?
  • This might have been disappointing to the edBPM pundits, but the vendors basically agreed that this term had no formal “legs” yet: no one had a marketing campaign around event driven BPM, no one had tried to persuade an analyst to take up (or define) the term, and the large BPM vendor and consultant community would not want their “BPM” mindshare asset diluted.
• Do we need new/enhanced standards for edBPM? And what is the challenge to insert/combine Complex Events in BPM? Versus say an example model for non-deterministic approaches like Smart Fraud Management in Banking?
  • The new BPMN2 standard has started the process of adding interesting event extensions to BPMN, while there are existing standards for other models (PRR for production rules, UML State for entity lifecycles, BMM for motivations, PMML for analytics, the proposed DMN for decision models, and so forth).
  • The Fraud example shows how some existing fraud products might work, but again is too specific - what if other event pattern detection and event pattern discovery techniques are desired?
• Related to the above point was the proposal for new standards at the domain level for edBPM…
  • “The good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from” comes to mind here: effort would be better spent event-enabling the existing standards (what are the relevant loads and what combinations of the domain data models are relevant as payloads?)…
• Although the panel did not progress to the next question, it is interesting nontheless: what is required to set up edBPM projects and/or what aspects of edBPM need to be researched further?
  • Probably there is some methodology work to be done on when to use processes, rules/queries or states and how to combine them…
  • Areas of outstanding research in edBPM are probably joint semantics (a.k.a. the promise of BPDM) across different process types (including CEP), CEP-enabled BPMN, and mergers of event operations with (some aspect of the voluminous domain of) the SOA service standards.

The original CITT proposal can be found at http://www.citt-online.com/downloads/EDBPM-IP-proposal.ppt .

BPM circa 1910

… was a full (if small) classroom at Ulm Universitat in S Germany this week, as part of BPM2009 - not normal CEP territory of course. Besides the TIBCO keynote (covering, of course,  the various synergies between event and rule processing in high-performance and dynamic BPM), there were several papers presented on the general area of event-driven BPM.

One of the interesting observations was that 2 of the papers were about Aris’ Event Process Chain and its relationship to BPEL. Now, EPC is a (non standard) model notation at a slightly higher abstraction level than BPMN. And of course, BPMN / process orchestrations are event driven but hardly model the events as first-class citizens (as an exercise, take any reasonable BPMN diagram, shrink the activity task boxes and enlarge the event circles, and observe the effect). And of course, BPEL is not normally considered anything special for event processing. In my humble opinion there is much more of interest to edBPM than just simple event processing and BPEL!

For more on BPM2009, check out Sandy Kemsley’s blog. Meanwhile, I’ll be trying to keep out of the way of the Porsches tearing up the autobahn…

… is the title for the replacement to (and presumed superset of) the Case Management OMG specification proposal, per this report from OMG task force co-chair Fred Cummins, albeit within the interesting context of advanced healthcare IT [*1].

Very relevant to the knowledge-driven medical domain (and to case management) is the ability to respond to events (as in event-driven or event-based processes) - events provide new information that extend both the current patient and medical condition knowledgebases, for example. Out-of-sequence and disruptive events need to be handled, and medical deductions and conclusions can certainly be defined as “complex events” (i.e. aggregations and combinations of prior events) … probably with the addition of some probability factor!

Also very relevant is that inference rules are one of the more useful knowledge representation mechanisms - used both in formal logic as well as business rule engines - making rule-driven processes truly declarative, ad hoc and dynamic. Event-driven and rule-driven processes are both areas covered by CEP technologies like TIBCO BusinessEvents. And in OMG inference rules are covered by the PRR extension to UML.

On the other hand, the term “knowledge-driven” [*2] can cover a number of things beyond “event-driven business processes” and “rule-driven business processes”. For example, events can be viewed as documentable and classifiable constructs for use in ontologies (like OWL), and rules can be followed by medical staff, such as via checklists or flowcharts. There is also the domain of “knowledge management” in the form of content or document management  - probably ideal for case note recordings.

Fred’s comments include:

“Knowledge-driven processes for treatment of medical conditions will support intuitive medicine with improved tracking and record-keeping while supporting performance measurement and encoding of insights to improve and streamline practices.” Whenever I read “tracking” and “performance measurement” I think of event tracking and concepts like “track and trace”. When I  read “encoding of insights” I see “situation awareness”. Note these are both key complex event processing indicators!

“Specifications of activities can easily be changed to introduce new technology or to provide guidance in the use of certain procedures or medications. More precise processes can be incorporated using conventional business process modeling technology, but processes can still be adjusted to deal with unforeseen circumstances.” I’m pretty sure Fred doesn’t mean to imply ad hoc processes are imprecise, but in fact may be selected or defined according to current knowledge. Knowledge representation in automated systems usually involves rules - and event-driven rules are typical of CEP technology.

“Both intuitive and precise processes can be interwoven and evolved as improved techniques that are discovered or developed.” This means ad-hoc processes mixing manual and automated processing. Most medical processes involve a health-practitioner-in-the-loop, so this makes perfect sense.

In my humble opinion, knowledge-driven processes (including medical processes), and their associated models, are a very interesting area, with much overlap with the state-of-the-art rule-driven CEP world. Whether there is enough concensus for a standardization effort yet, given (1) only 2 vendors responded to the preceding OMG RFI on “dynamic process activity modeling” and (2) “knowledge-driven process” is such a new term it doesn’t even have an entry on Wikipedia yet (!), is open to debate… which no doubt will occur at the next OMG meeting.

Notes:

[1] Interestingly, advanced medical healthcare support is one of the first use cases in the EPTS Use Cases Working Group.

[2] Possibly the proposed standard is simply misnamed. For example a better fit might be the moniker “Ad hoc Process Modeling” (or somesuch) that would avoid any contentious issues around “knowledge” coverage and representation.