For an interesting read of a BPM perspective on the importance of events, check out Roeland Loggen’s blog entry titled “4 reasons to capture your events“. In particular 2 thoughts struck home:
1. Roeland expands on the importance of events and suggests an event “capturing and recording system” to direct events (based on rules) to the appropriate ERP/BPM/etc system. This implies an event-driven architecture using some kind of efficient event-based infrastructure.
2. The last sentance is my favorite: “…And in the future maybe even more intelligent – able to relate events (which one belong to another) and see patterns, trouble (new account opening, and directly a cancel?) or fraud…”. The good news for Roeland is that these intelligent systems are already being built and in production today, under the term “complex event processing systems”.
This is a good segue onto another alphabet soup topic, CEP and BPM…