I was at OMG this week when the submissions for the proposed “case management standard” (called Case Management Process Modelling or CMPM) were discussed. What was interesting was that one of the submissions spent a lot of time positioning ECA – Event Condition Action – rules as a means to model and execute the launching of activities and achievement of milestones in cases.
ECA is of course a widely used CEP paradigm: in a tool like TIBCO BusinessEvents the ECA rules are defined as conventional (in OMG parlance, PRR-type) production rules, where an event is just like any other fact to drive the rules. ECA rules also drive the traversal of state models (and state machines at runtime), as well as coordinate the conventional manual business processes. It is therefore interesting that Case Management – considered by many to be just an extension to BPM and mostly achievable with BPMN – is also proving to be an example of business process mechanism convergence (e.g. BPMN-type BPM orchestration of explicit activities, for example representing a plan, working alongside declarative rule constructs and technologies like ECA rules). For a real-world example of the latter, take a look at TIBCO Fulfillment Orchestration.
Of course, what neither the “rule technology world” nor these CMPM submissions have defined is a good business modeling technique to represent ECA rules. Such a business model may take the form of something as simple as a rule template, or something like a decision model. On the latter front, standardisation of decision models via the OMG DMN (Decision Model and Notation) effort seems to be gaining steam with pretty much all the main players in the process of registering (via Letters Of Intent) to take part. A good sign for process *and* rule standardisation … and of course decisions are somewhat useful in case management too!
