Intelligent Business Operations: BPM & Analytics in the Event-Driven Enterprise

By Glenn Smith Dec 12, 2011

In recent years, Complex Event Processing (CEP) has emerged as a key technology that leading businesses use to differentiate themselves from competitors. Traditional enterprise software responds to atomic events in isolation. CEP allows enterprises to identify related events (or even the lack of expected events). When combined with powerful real-time analytics applied to those event patterns, important business trends — which are not visible in the isolated items — can be revealed. These revelations can help identify, in near real time, risks and opportunities that the enterprise can use to gain advantage. However, those insights will not actually yield advantage unless related processes are in place, or can be put in place quickly, to effect business action. Business Process Management (BPM) software is designed to enable precisely this sort of agile, on-the-fly action.

The combination of CEP and real-time analytics natively integrated with a BPM platform delivers what Gartner, Inc. has termed “Intelligent Business Operations.” Gartner first defined this concept in a June 2011 report, stating,

Companies in many different industries are improving their effectiveness and efficiency by making certain aspects of their operations more intelligent. Intelligent business operations are a style of work in which real-time analytic and decision management technologies are integrated into the transaction-executing and bookkeeping operational activities that run the business. Intelligent business operations are becoming increasingly practical because of the growing amount of data generated by sources inside and outside the company, and because of the wide availability of software tools to process that data immediately.”

Linking Events, Process Creates Advantage

CEP systems monitor the many data streams flowing through an organization and, based on business rules, search for specific relationships between the individual events that may signal the occurrence of some larger event. CEP systems can not only identify unexpected occurrences, but also the absence of expected events.

In any modern large enterprise, there are millions of messages flowing through the systems. They are not neatly sequenced and categorized, and they have many independent sources and destinations. This is often described in the CEP literature as the “Event Cloud” to signify the lack of order and structure. CEP systems examine the data flowing through the cloud and identify relationships that may be important to the enterprise. Early identification positions the organization to respond before the risk does harm or before the opportunity goes away.

This advantageous visibility can only be turned into actual business advantage through fast and appropriate business action. CEP systems can be powerful in identifying events, but the organization must still respond to them in a timely manner. BPM systems provide the natural complement for resolution of events identified by CEP. Traditional BPM systems are best at automating well-understood and defined business processes, while CEP systems are designed to identify the unexpected. However, more advanced BPM systems are increasingly good at handling a combination of structured and unstructured processes in what is commonly thought of as Adaptive or Dynamic Case Management Scenarios. This type of BPM software leverages real-time collaboration, ideally through a Facebook-style Social BPM interface, uniting process with systems of record and document stores. This instant collaboration within the BPM interface allows both structured and ad hoc process to keep moving forward effectively.

Explicit linkage between the triggering event and the resulting process response provides a comprehensive audit trail and evidence as to why a particular instance was handled in a particular manner. This is especially important documentation for those cases handled without human intervention. The same information can also be used to refine both the event identification rules and the response strategies. In particular, analysis of “false positives” can allow the organization to reduce them and concentrate its resources on issues with real impact.

An organization based on “Intelligent Business Operations” will use a single platform that integrates events, analytics and process. This allows a unified view of all activity related to any particular business event or process participant. It extends the value of the alert sent from the CEP system by allowing that new information to be analyzed in the right context and acted on appropriately. The selected response should depend not only on the immediate triggering event, but also on a complete picture of the relationship with the customer, supplier, partner or business unit involved.