Last week’s OMG standards meeting included an interesting presentation by John Hall of Model Systems (and SSADM fame) on the role of (business) events in linking business (policy-type) rules to business processes. John normally deals with business modeling artifacts like OMG BMM and OMG SBVR, so it was interesting to see how this community sees “business events” as being the key glue between “business rules” and “business processes” – something that Ron Ross has also been advocating [*1].
Now, neither BMM nor SBVR are particularly “event-aware” standards, and the goal for SBVR pundits is to exploit such business rules to determine the content of (and ensure enforcement within) business processes (as defined in models like BPMN). John’s presentation was basically how “events” linked policy-type business rules to business processes (in BPMN). Interestingly John proposed analyzing the available terms and facts for appropriate events (as in “new”, “update”, “delete” etc) through a cross-reference table. Compared to event processing IT systems:
- the observable business events tend to be what is already on the event bus, and are very much a subset of all possible CRUD operations on all available business concepts
- complex events often align to interesting “business facts”, and CEP is about determining, from some prior sequence of other events, when these business events occur (or will occur).
Hopefully this will be the start of business modelling of abstract events to help join the business rule documenters with the business rule automators – and its my opinion that event-driven rule-based systems are probably going to prove the easiest to join this gap.
Notes:
[1] This is an interesting Lithuanian paper that looks at rules in UML from both an SBVR and IT perspective. Note the mention of state models, production rules and events – which should be familiar to any user of TIBCO BusinessEvents (although as existing COTS prior art this didn’t warrant a reference in the paper).
