I enjoyed the CIO UK article (mis)titled “Why BPM Should Be On The CIO’s Agenda in 2010”, where Dr Giles Nelson of Apama points out the benefits of event processing technology to “detect situations” and aid business processes. Giles’ article is of course part of a post-BPM-acquisition marketing campaign, and would be more accurately titled “Why Event Processing should be on BPM’s Agenda in 2010”, but he makes some valid points nonetheless:
…we need to take a different view of BPM technology and try to see how it can be used to make knowledge-based business more ‘operationally responsive’…
…the potential for creating real business value by bringing together the two disciplines of event processing and BPM is substantial…
…BPM will get really interesting when it is combined with event processing and can therefore detect situations that are occurring and automatically begin a process that takes action on that information…
…It’s about delivering real-time insight into what’s going on in processes across the organisation and, using that insight, to drive efficiencies…
All very true. Many BPM folk are of course still mostly concerned with defining what happens today, not what needs to happen tomorrow: in some ways event processing is just another step up the real-world business process maturity model.
