Timo Elliot's presentation on "Business in the moment - from reactive to proactive"

Timo Elliot from SAP gave a recent talk in the Gartner BI meeting in London entitled "Business in the moment -from reactive to proactive". You can download the presentation from a link in Timo's Blog posting.   In a following post on his Blog,  Timo refers to an FreshDirect explaining the proactive behavior:

“FreshDirect has an operations center that manages its fleet of delivery trucks. In a large metropolitan area like New York, traffic doesn’t always flow predictably. A traditional approach to BI would be to print a report showing the level of on-time deliveries (OTDs) the day before and then ask the transportation department what went wrong for the orders that were delivered late. FreshDirect uses analytics in a more impactful way.”

“The company monitors the delivery rate of every truck and enters that data into the BI system on an ongoing basis. Every hour, it uses the previous hour’s data to predict how many deliveries will be on-time in the next hour. If the predicted OTD rate is below FreshDirect’s target, the company sends out an auxiliary truck or trucks to help make deliveries. The company holds 10 trucks in reserve for just this purpose.”

I'll bring more proactive stories when I'll find out about them...

Reactive and proactive as relative terms

This is one of the most famous visual paradoxes, in this picture one can see a young girl or and old woman, some people see only one of them, with some concentration one see both.   This is a kind of relative view, in event processing there are some relative terms, I have written a while ago about the fact that the terms raw and derived events are relative,  a derived event in one sub-system can be raw event of another sub-system.. 
There are other cases of relative views (an entity may be both consumer and producer, for instance).  


I have reminded on relativism while reading an article about the keynote talk of Jeff Shulman (Gartner's manager of the application integration and web services analysts team).  Shulman is talking about cloud, mobile and CEP as the leading trends for application development and integration.   
As a remark to Shulman's keynote, the article bring an interesting response of  Chris Dressler, VP Technology in Cablevision,  he sees a  CEP can be used to find and correct issues before the end user has the need to make a complaining call.
This is an interesting example,  from the service provider's point of view (cable TV company in this case), this is a reactive application, tracking events that already happened and react to them, from the home consumer point of view this might be proactive, since the consumer may not yet felt the impact of the problem, so from the consumer point of view, this is elimination of problem that has not really happened.    More on this distinction - later.