I was going to blog on the presentations at the Decision Modeling Information Day at OMG, but suffice to say that James Taylor has already done a great job of this so I will just add a few comments from the CEP perspective…
1. CEP can be viewed just as “complex event” detection… but increasingly businesses want “complex event” *processing*, where processing is not just event detection but also decision and reaction. Of course, the reaction can be a traditional orchestrated business process, as in a pattern like:
(a) detect fraud event (b) decide appropriate action (c) react with the Fraud Handling business process
2. Business modeling of decisions, as well as complex events, is an area that none of the traditional business modeling tools seem to be taking seriously. Yet both decision automation and CEP provide huge values to business operations.
3. Methodologists on the decision modeling side are finding receptive audiences in business. These include the KPI Decision Model, which was endorsed by Mark Pettit from Freddie Mac at the info day, the new BRS Question-Charts, and Alan Fish’s DRA. Adapting these for real-time, event-based decisions should be possible, as Larry Goldberg from KPI discussed in the meeting: the main difference with top-down analysis of decisions is that you may or may not be able to detect some of the desired business events!
4. There were some good questions on the role of analytics in, for example, driving CEP-based decisions, or in risk management for trading systems. For example, TIBCO Spotfire Data Miner can be used to generate rules for classification decisions inside a TIBCO BusinessEvents CEP system dealing with high volumes of trading events in a stateful manner.
5. The proposed DMN standard discussed at the end of the Information Day should of course equally apply to decisions in CEP as well as BPM.
