Interesting to see Jim Sinur post on the “event viewpoint” in his BPM blog.
It’s all about events and events are in complete control. Pure and simple, events rule and processes seek out expected events and maybe try and catch unexpected events.
That might be a bit “strong”, but yes, events drive processes and processes generate events.
Case management is controlled by the change in state data and there is always an overriding high level model. While each of the individual steps might not be known, the process again is in control.
This seems a bit like saying “we don’t know what it is, but whatever it is, it’s a process”. At a high level, you can argue that any collection of operations is a “process”. And if so, I don’t see why CEP can’t be thought of as such a (special kind of) process. Likewise a decisioning step (i.e. decision process). And so on.
Sure there are unexpected events, but the process model can be tweaked to include these new events/representing exceptions unless the unexpected events obviate the need for the process and undermine the design assumptions for the process.
If Jim is talking about a “process orchestration model”, and he is trying to model a process that is mostly exceptions, then good luck! I’d recommend this case study as a suitable counter to that process models cover all!
The new world of BPM will balance the need for both [event and process views].
I think we can all agree to that!
