Opher Etzion recorded some action items for the Event Processing Technical Society at the EPTS5 symposium last week. One of these was “promotion of EPTS” as the go-to resource for event processing information (hence the irony that these action items are duly listed on Opher’s blog and not anywhere on the EPTS web site).
One of these was the idea of an ROI Working Group to share and propagate ROI stories (this being a safe activity for vendors to share as customers seeing ROI will not likely be poachable by other vendors!). But how should ROI be measured and reported?
Coincidentally a colleague just mentioned an airline customer who just went live with a new track-and-trace CEP application – an application with an estimated €2M per year payback.
Some observations here:
- This was an IT project completed during a big downswing in the airline industry, whilst many other conventional IT projects were being cancelled or postponed – but the ROI was compelling enough for this project to survive.
- The application used a distributed rule engine architecture, exploiting TIBCO BusinessEvents‘ agent-based architecture.
Another coincidence: I was just listening to Paul Coby, CIO of BA, talking about the need for lean and agile approaches in the airline industry, at IRMUK’s BPM2009. His message was ‘there are no IT projects, only business projects’ – all with business goals and KPIs to be measured. Model-driven CEP applications like the airline use case above certainly qualify as lean and agile… I wonder if BA is exploiting CEP like its competitors are?
