On basic classification of terms

Besides the fact that there is still a sort of uncertainty among the general IT community about what is event processing (or CEP, which is the most common TLA associated with it), some discussion on the Blogsphere lead to further confusion --- e.g. claiming that CEP equals BRMS. Carole-Ann Matignon,VP, Product Management at Fair Isaac, has nice posting in her Blog, talking about this confusion, and providing what she calls simplistic view of the definitions of BPM, BRMS, and CEP. I'll go with the simplistic direction of thinking and claim that this is a mix of terms from three different domains -- application, technique and function.

Function answers the question --- what is being done ?
Technique answers the question -- how something being done ?
Application answers the question --- what is the problem being solved ?

Examples

• Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) is an application type, it solves the problem of controlling the business activities in order to optimize the business, deal with exceptions etc...

• Business Rules are type of technique --- which can be used to infer facts from other facts or rules (inference rules) , or to determine action when event occurs and condition is satisfied (ECA rules) and more (there are at least half a dozen types of rules, which are techniques to do something).

• Event Processing is really a set of functions which does what the name indicates -- process events --- processing can be filtering, transforming, enriching, routing, detect patterns, deriving and some more.

Of course there are inter-relationships among them --- some types of business rules are a non exclusive way to execute some of the functions of event processing -- e.g. ECA rules can be used for routing, inference rules can be used for event derivation and more. However, there are other techniques that can be used for each of this functions. Likewise, a BAM application may use event processing functions as part of its implementation, but may also use other techniques (e.g. being data-driven rather than event-driven and do all its processing in retrospect, looking at committed data periodically and not on events as data-in-motion). Business Rules can be used for various utilization in BAM and in BPM applications, with or without the use of event processing.

The functions of event processing is typically used for several motivations:

• Observation into business processes, business activity monitoring.
• Dynamic reaction and modification to transactions and business processes
• Diagnosis of problems and finding root-cause.
• Prediction of future problematic events that need to be eliminated or mitigated
• Dissemination of data in motion to arrive to the right person at the right time in the right granularity.
  

These motivations are not applications --- there are multiple applications that perform diagnosis -- system management, car repairs, medicine diagnosis, oil drilling management; there are also multiple applications that perform more than one of these -- e.g. observation and reaction or prediction and reaction. I have blogged before about the metaphor of blind people touching an elephant -- there are some people who are looking at a single line of applications, or a single implementation techniques and saying CEP is X, while another person who is thinking on another concept is saying the CEP is Y, thus a confusion is being created - the following elephant's picture illustrates it (taken from the original postings).


Bottom line: the confusion is a result of equating terms from various classes, and resolving this confusion is indeed very simple.