TIBCO’s presentation at BRForum, an event dominated by multiple flavors of “business rule engine” vendors, was not meant to be provocative but simply to explain some of the benefits of Complex Event Processing / event-based views on “business rules” from both the business analysis perspective and the rule execution perspective. However, it also seemed quite timely given the conference analyst presentations expounding the benefits of CEP for business rule processing. It was also timely given the CEP coverage at last week’s ORF, and recent blog postings on the benefits or otherwise of inferencing (/ Rete rule processing).
The basic premise is: for “business rule” declarations, associating the applicable events helps understand how such rules can be enforced. And once those rules are mapped into production rules or decision models, the same event-to-rule mapping makes execution both simpler and easier to update. Lesson over.
Unfortunately, my smugness at presenting this supposed “revelation” for BRForum attendees was short-lived. Later in the conference, consultant Brian Dickinson expounded on how putting “process silos” between “events” and “rules” was nothing more than a bad practice dating from the pre-IT age, when instead we should be modeling event contexts and bypassing the need to store data at “every step”. And later, decision-table guru Prof Jan Vanthienen explained how business process diagrams were nothing more than a visualization of a set of rules – and quite often a redundent onewhen used in business automation cases, where applying rules directly to events was a much more efficient representation…
For a less biased view of the presentation check out Sandy Kemsley and Eric Charpentier‘s blog posts…
