Business Rules Forum this week, and the keynote was Gartner’s Jim Sinur talking about business patterns – and how businesses needed to identify and recognise such patterns to drive processes and decisions. Apparently this topic was a big hit at a recent Gartner conference. So one of Jim’s slides shows a bunch of “data points” and how one needs to find “patterns” in the data points… which was beginning to look familiar to those who have watched TIBCO presentations on CEP!
Being a Gartner analyst, Jim naturally had to attempt a classification of these “information patterns” – and indeed presented a chart with axes for innovation versus risk and strategic versus operational – which probably means this has to go through at least one more interation (as I’m sure most CFO’s will classify innovation *as* a risk!).
Jim mentioned the “pattern seeking technologies” as predictive analytics, social media, information media / middleware, Complex Event Processing, and “intelligent decision” platforms. In his view businesses will need to move to these from the current technologies like BPM. In reality of course such patterns will simply be fed *into* existing business processes…
Finally, Jim described his view on the evolution path for “pattern-capable” business software, as a type of business tecnology maturity model, from BPM +events +BAM +BI to rules, goals, and MDM and thence to collaborative and social software.
The bottom line: information and event pattern detection is key for agile businesses. And CEP is a mainstream technology providing these detection capabilities…
