Tuesday, June 25, 2013

On speed and accuracy in event processing

This scary picture is taken from Theo Priestley's post in "Business Intelligence".   As a follow-up to his previous post about the two recent acquisitions in event processing, he talks about the focus in this world on speed.   While speed can provide relative advantage it can also be a double edge sword, if it comes on the expense of accuracy, as the recent Twitter hoax indicates.  
When talking about the the four Vs of big data -  one of them is velocity, and the other is veracity - which is defined as "data in doubt".  Indeed  processing  uncertain, inexact or inaccurate events or data is a major part of what big data is all about -- while there are some works in this area (for example: see my post from last year), it is still the less investigated part of the four Vs.  
Priestley is right -- doing things fast and inaccurate can incur big damage, doing things slow and accurate can also incur big damage.  The wisdom is to balance and minimize the risk.   Resolving the uncertainty issue is the key.   

Sunday, June 23, 2013

Maturity model for event processing

This slide is taken from the tutorial that Jeff Adkins and myself are planned to deliver exactly a week from today in Arlington, Texas - DEBS 2013.    It describes our view about "maturity model of event processing - IT view", showing the status of event processing use in an organization.  This follows the CMMI models.  
This model is used to evaluate the current status and determine next steps.  I guess that most organizations are in  levels 1 and 2.       This is first draft -- will be  glad to get comments.