A call for papers has gone around for the workshop on “event-driven BPM” to be held 9-10 Sept in Ulm, Germany, [*1] part of a wider academic conference on BPM [*2]. This terminology might come as a surprise to the BPM community, who already generally consider “events” to be key drivers of “processes”. The workshop announcement continues:
The recently coined term «Event-Driven Business Process Management» (EDBPM) is nowadays an enhancement of Business Process Management (BPM) by new concepts of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Event Driven Architecture (EDA), Software as a Service (SaaS), Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) and Complex Event Processing (CEP).
Ignoring the buzzword bingo, it should be pointed out that this “research area” is also a candidate for future EU Research funding – “acronym compliance” [*3] being very important for the Brussels bureaucrats.
In this context BPM means a software platform which provides companies the ability to model, manage, and optimize these processes for significant gain. As an independent system, CEP is a parallel running platform that analyses and processes events. The BPM- and the CEP-platform correspond via events which are produced by the BPM-workflow engine and by the – if distributed – IT services which are associated with the business process steps.
This is a relatively common CEP implementation pattern: using CEP to monitor and correlate events from multiple IT systems including BPM. For example, consider a CEP system monitoring document flow (i.e. “document track and trace”) at an insurance company as well as the appropriate business processes.
Also events coming from different event sources in different forms can trigger a business process or influence the execution of the process or a service, which can result in another event. Even more, the correlation of these events in a particular context can be treated as a complex, business level event, relevant for the execution of other business processes or services.
This is a slightly different CEP pattern: determining complex events that cause or invoke the relevant workflows. For example, consider a CEP fraud detection application that invokes the necessary processes to handle a suspected fraud (i.e. “sense and respond”).
A business process – arbitrarily fine or coarse grained – can be seen as a service again and can be “choreographed” with other business processes or services, even between different enterprises and organisations.
This is the idea of “business services” that encompass “business processes” and “IT services”, as espoused in Fred Cummin’s recent book “Building the Agile Enterprise: With SOA, BPM and MBM” – although this confusingly overloads “SOA” from a business perspective as well as its normal IT definition. Another related extension of BPM is the recent announcement of an OMG RFP for Case Management, combining event-driven business processes with case information and event records …
Loosely coupled event-driven architecture for BPM provides important benefits:
– Responsiveness. Events can occur at any time from any source and processes respond to them immediately, whenever they happen and wherever they happen.
– Agility. New processes can be modeled, implemented, deployed, and optimized more quickly in response to changing business requirements.
– Flexibility. Processes can span heterogeneous platforms and programming languages. Participating applications can be upgraded or changed without breaking the process model.
This is probably the main point: running BPM under an EDA adds flexibility etc etc. At TIBCO we already have customers doing rule-driven business processes combining TIBCO BusinessEvents (managing events, driving workflow) with TIBCO iProcess (managing workflow tasks and queues) under the moniker “BPM+”.
Notes:
[1] I see the workshop website claims “The workshop is organized by the active Working Group of the international Event Processing Technical Society (EPTS)” – but AFAIK, apart from EPTS members being involved with this workshop, this is not in itself an EPTS event.
[2] There is also an interesting co-located workshop on “Process Intelligence” which is also very relevant to the BAM-CEP overlap – for example using CEP to correlate process activities with external indicators (events) of process success…
[3] Presumably future versions will replace “SaaS” with “Cloud Computing” to be fully up-to-date.
