Taking the complex out of complex event processing

The quote of this week is taken from an article in InformationAge that talks about operational intelligence. 

The article explains what operational intelligence means, and you can read it to see if you find anything new.

The point of this post is a quote done by Ivan Casanova from TIBCO:  

“We should all be focused on taking the 'complex' out of complex event processing" 

This quote is in the context of explaining the acquisition of Streambase by TIBCO.    I don't know Mr. Casanova personally, but what I have learned from his statement is that he believes that going forward, the programming model and tools represented by Streambase are better fit and less complex to use that TIBCO has done before, where it extended RETE based business rules system to handle stateful event processing cases, while retaining the rule-based programming model.    Streambase is using an "event flow" model that is some variation of event processing network.    Without getting to analysis of specific products (a restriction I have taken upon myself in this Blog), I would say that overall I believe that as a conceptual model for event processing I believe in the EPN model (which is of the family of data flow models),  and in visual working environment (better than textual working environments) to design and program.   This reduces the complexity for IT developers, which I think is very important trend.   The ultimate reduction of complexity requires one more step -  event processing modeling in the level of the business user level and automatic translation to an implementation language.  

Bottom line: I agree with the statement in the quote -- actually this is my main area of interest nowadays. 

On continuous compliance

The Waters special report sponsored by Apama that was published recently,  ranked "risk and compliance" as the number one application of event processing in financial institutions.   Today TIBCO also published in its Blog under the "event processing" category its view on compliance - entitled: "The Y in comply".   It gives the view that people comply better when they understand the rationale of compliance, the example given is compliance with regulation in the food industry that employee has to wash hands before putting on gloves.  

I agree that people comply better when they think that the regulation makes sense,  however, my own subjective impression is that in the current culture, compliance became goal of its own whose sole reason as somebody described it "to get the regulator off my back".   Thus employees are required to do things that they don't see any reasonable explanation why they should do it, and IT systems check that they are doing it. Here, event processing is used  since in various cases auditing is event-driven, it is time sensitive an often involves calculation in time windows, and in some cases online auditing on the fly is required. The business value sometimes is just pleasing regulators, but this is often a great motivation for managements to take it very seriously...   Anyway, technologies are used for strange reasons sometimes...