Checking through the presentations and workshops for IRMUK’s Business Analysis (and BPM) 2009 conference last month, I thought it would be interesting to see much focus there was on business event modeling.
Probably the star (from the event perspective) was James Archer from the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (in London, UK) who presented how a using new requirements approach saved a particular BPM project. The interesting aspect here was the inclusion of (and emphasis on) modeling context (in terms of stakeholders and their interaction events) and the individual business events involved. James uses a particular requirements template, although the spec doesn’t seem to particularly emphasize the business events angle at all. Oh well…
Of the other workshops and presentations, there was a preponderance, as one would expect, of the “process view” of event modeling.
Roger Burlton and Paul Harmon’s workshop on “Business Process Architecture” was typical of the “BPM view” but made some concessions to the “business event” perspective. This included a “business event view” to model the scope of business processes, as an alternative to the process relationship view. Business events though meant the start or end of processes, and that’s it. KPIs (which we in the CEP world can usually consider as “complex events”) were treated differently – as measures of activities from rules and processes (vs objectives).
Dee Carri’s “Principles of BPM” workshop only mentioned “event” when explaining BPMN, while Kathy Long’s “Process Modelling and Analysis Lessons Learned” followed the view that business events’ primary role was to start and end processes.
Ron Ross’ workshop on “Business Rules, Analysis and BPM” unfortunately missed events and temporal effects in his introduction to business rules (or indeed events as the driver of rules) – however, events were clearly marked as the main artifact in the “when / time” column in the Zachman Framework that Ron referred to. Ron adapts Zachman to his own Proteus business rule framework which has:
- Row 1 (for sponsors) covers business events as the “scope” for the “when/time” column.
- Row 2 (business model) has these business events mapped to “business milestones” (which I would argue is a specific strategic business event, not a generic business model artifact for any business event – but probably I am missing the point); these are used to define “timings” in business rules.
- Row 3 (“computable model”) maps these business events and milestones to state transition diagrams.
Chris Bradley and Tim Franklin of IPL gave a workshop introducing BPMN (version 1 anyway) and provided a top-down view of notations useful for business processes covering Input Output, Agent, State and Workflow diagrams. Interestingly their “BPMN in a nutshell” was “event occurs, prompts a decision that invokes an activity“… they then covered BPMN event types in some detail:
- start events (circles with a thin single border) such as message, timer, rule (invokes event), link (process sequence event), and multiple (as well as a null / no info event)
- intermediate events (circles with 2 thin borders placed on activity boundaries) which can be the same type as start events, but also covers error and compensation events
- end events (circles with a thick single border) are the same as intermediate events, but add a terminate event and subtract timer and rule events.
- Editorial note: BPMN 2.0 adds non-interrupting events, as well as exception (event) driven subprocesses…
Alec Sharp presented on “Process Redesign to IT Requirements” and covered business events in his own methodology under Business Services: using event analysis and state transition analysis alongside business rule analysis to list events and services. His “good process” model was the same as in the BPMN workshop: events drive steps-and-decisions drive results. Alec also picked up on the role of events in use cases.
Roger Burlton’s keynote on “BPM Perspectives” was very neutral (for a BPM conference) and mentioned the “event point of view”, as well as identifying messages, messangers and timetables – albeit from the process worker / workflow perspective, although these also apply at the automated event processing level.
Frits Bussemaker’s graphical presentation on “Corporation to Cooperation” didn’t have many words in it, but a key slide was “time is the new currency“…
In summary, it seems the event perspective has still to evolve in business analysis and modeling in the mainstream (as represented by this conference, in any case). But there were some good ideas here.
