John Trigg over on the Apama blog had a post today - The Opportunity for Business Intelligence: Is it Evolution or Revolution? - that made me think about Complex Event Processing(CEP) and Decision Mangement.

Many of the posts I see about CEP, like John’s, are trying to compare CEP with BI and so-called Operational BI in particular. John even raises my question for me:

But how do you transform those graphs and charts and metrics into actions – this is what operational BI is looking at. And this is where the intersection with BAM, CEP, and EDA comes into play.

The answer to this question is, of course, not to try and deliver more graphs and charts. This does not really help even if you can do so in a really pretty dashboard that updates in real time. If you want to move from insight to action and do so in real time then you need to automate the decisions that trigger these actions. If you are going to wait for someone to notice then you run the very real risk that no action will be taken in time.

So the answer to John’s question is not just that there is an intersection between CEP, Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) and Event-Driven Architecture (EDA). There is also a need for the automation and management of the decisions that must be taken in response to these events. Decision Management must be part of the solution.

Related posts:

1. Decisions matter to Complex Event Processing
2. Event processing and decisioning are complementary
3. Decision Services, Decision Agents and Event Processing
4. Live from IMPACT - Business Event Processing
5. Why Events Matter To The Business