Did you ever try to find your favorite flavor of candy in the midst of many others? This is what it is like to find business events of interest. There is lot of interest around complex events processing (CEP) today as organizations look for conditions that might signal conditions in the context in which they operate. While organizations are likely to sense some of these in business processes, events by themselves may have the hidden signals of an emerging business scenario that might need attention. These emerging scenarios may be planned or not. We are no longer living in a “steady state” world, so paying attention to business events is crucial. With that said, it is not as easy as it sounds. So far, I’ve seen several ways of turning seemingly insignificant signals into candidate business events. To complicate matters, there are multiple sources and scads of insignificant events that have to be screened.
![MPj04306630000[1]](http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/files/2009/04/windowslivewriterfindingthebluecandyislikediscoveringgerm-d6admpj043066300001-2.jpg)
Discovery via Rules:
One way to sort through the reams of events might be a set of filters/rules that can be pre-planned and dynamically adjusted as conditions emerge. This is particularly effective when an organization has completed a scenario planning effort that links policies and rules to expected scenarios.
Discovery via Patterns:
Another effect way to deal with event recognition is to identify specific patterns of interest. As events accumulate over time a pattern of multiple elated events emerges. As these emerging patterns match predefined patterns and/or portions of patterns, organizations can be notified of partial or full patterns. Interesting, yet unexpected patterns can also be flagged.
Discovery via Process:
Quite often processes detect exceptional activity that can be events/event patterns of interest. BPM technologies can catch these exceptions and notify organizations of unique exceptions. Sometimes these exceptions repeat and become legitimate and expected process activities. Other times they are anomalies that may signal something important. See (http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/03/31/processes-enable-early-warning-for-emerging-business-scenarios/
Discovery via Algorithms:
Sometimes rules, patterns and processes are not enough to discover significant event/event patterns. There might be a need to leverage special algorithms such as predictive analysis, genetic patterns, simulation etc. I expect this to evolve over time
Discovery via Context:
This category involves the emerging science of complexity theory that senses patterns and the interaction of multiple patterns in an environment that is being discovered. This is a discovery method established better mental maps in their impact against emerging changes and patterns.
While each of these approaches can contribute to helping to find changes in business patterns, customer behavior, emerging threats/ opportunities and community wants, they can be used in concert.
8 responses so far ↓
1 Complex Event Processing (CEP) Blog » CEP and Complexity Theory // Apr 24, 2009 at 6:02 pm
[...] Sinur at Gartner has posted his views on CEP on his blog. Jim comments on “event discovery” (a.k.a. detection?) via rules, patterns (maybe [...]
2 What is the Greatest Hurdle Facing BPM? // Apr 29, 2009 at 6:13 pm
[...] While BPM works well with structured data and content management capabilities, BPM needs to embrace events beyond the progress of business activities in the known paths of a pre-defined process. Process will need to support more information around the context in which the process is running in at the moment. What is the effect of markets, geographies or the state of the partner chain that the process is operating within right now? This means close ties to complex event processing and intelligent decision management. This would not only include the current state of the process, but would include past trends to optimize process outcomes. Please see http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/04/22/finding-the-blue-candy-is-like-discovering-germane-bus... [...]
3 Naren Chawla // May 6, 2009 at 8:46 pm
Interesting… I grasp all but “Discovery via Context”. You mention using complexity theory. Can you elaborate and/or provide a good example of this?
4 Jim Sinur // May 7, 2009 at 12:08 pm
Naren,
I will use an example that occurs in the biological world. Let’s say you have a fish pond close to your house and you introduce 100’s of large fish to catch more dinner sized fish. You will actually deplete the pond of all fish rather quickly versus introducing smaller life forms to help the small fish prosper and grow the whole life chain. The same goes for identifying events and actions that can affect interlocked or shared processes.. I hope this helps
Jim
5 BPM Leverages Information // Jun 4, 2009 at 7:08 am
[...] http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/04/22/finding-the-blue-candy-is-like-discovering-germane-bus... [...]
6 Intelligent Decisions Go Beyond the Normal Ups and Downs // Jun 15, 2009 at 4:36 pm
[...] http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/04/22/finding-the-blue-candy-is-like-discovering-germane-bus... [...]
7 Why Isn’t Strategy a Bad Word in Down Times? // Jul 1, 2009 at 6:32 pm
[...] http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/04/22/finding-the-blue-candy-is-like-discovering-germane-bus... [...]
8 Ulf Persson // Jul 2, 2009 at 9:05 pm
This is also something I’ve seen and experienced with customers, and, without a doubt, capturing events at the right time and the right level to improve business processes is vital within a multi-enterprise business processing strategy. In order to effectively govern one’s ecosystem, one must have visibility into business transactions inside and outside the enterprise, and, depending on the user in this ecosystem, information should be visible at the right time for the user to act upon depending on how policies are enforced. Typically there are various types of roles within the ecosystem: the member of the community, the community administrator, enterprise IT and various types of business users.
Ulf Persson
Director, Product and Solutions Marketing
Axway
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