Jim Sinur

A member of the Gartner Blog Network

Jim Sinur
Research VP
2 years at Gartner
42 years IT industry

Jim Sinur is a vice president in Gartner Research after a short stint with a BPM vendor. Prior to that, Mr. Sinur was with Gartner 15 years and helped establish the BPI/BPM areas at Gartner and is considered a thought leader. His research and areas… Read Full Bio

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Discovering Germane Business Events is like Finding the Blue Candy:

by Jim Sinur  |  April 22, 2009  |  8 Comments

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.

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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.

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Category: BPM Business Process Improvement Business Rules Optimization Simulation     Tags: , , , ,

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