I am sitting now in my living room, watching the heavy rain outside.Rainy; We did not get a lot of rain this winter, however when the rain comes it tends to come in the wrong times, like weekends (Friday is part of our weekend which is Friday and Saturday, Sunday is a normal work day, it is used to catch up on things since in this day our colleagues from abroad are idle and there are no conference call and other interactions).
Today I would like to concentrate on the question --- what level in the Enterprise is event processing for, I had a recent discussion with somebody who investigated the BRMS market and asked him this question about BRMS, and the answer was the mostly BRMS products concentrate in the operational level, the typical example of BRMS is assignment of rate to insurance policy, which is clearly an operational decision. What is the situation in event processing ? There is a famous analyst presentation that talked about "detecting threats and opportunities" as part of the ROI for event processing pattern matching. Let's examine what's behind this title. Sometimes there are risks in the operational level, such as security attacks, but since this presentation have concentrated in the business area and not the IT, the meaning has been seeking opportunities for the business and mitigating risks for the business, which is beyond the operational level, such detection is probably in the tactical level, but the outcome can flow to the strategic level, since there may not be an answer to specific threat or opportunity within the current strategy. On the other hand, event processing is also associated with being done on-line (what some people call "real time" or "near real time" when they are not sure if it is really "real time", which is even worse as a term).
Some interesting questions on this topic are:
1. Whether organizations are really doing tactical and strategic decisions on-line ? in the illustration on the top of the page taken from the Microsoft site
the authors believe that tactical decisions is matters of days to months, and strategic decisions are done in resolution of quarters or years. Is there benefits/feasibility to change it online ?
2. Do we need different variations of event processing for the different levels ?
3. Is the semantics of events the same among all levels ?
4. Are there different complementary technologies, and different platforms in the different levels, or can we look at a single event processing system across levels?
Today I am just posting the question, will try to address each of these questions in subsequents postings.
