JT on EDM

There has been another flurry of posts around event processing and event management recently. IBM recently announced Business Event Management about which the architect guy had this feedback, Carole-Ann posted An attempt at demystifying CEP, BPM and BRMS and Eric Roch replied with EDA, CEP, BPM, BRMS and SOA. This is also a topic on which I blog regularly like this one on Decision Agents and this one over on my ebizQ  blog with links to a whole conversation I had with various bloggers. Now I don’t see this debate going away with IBM’s recent annoucement. What I see instead is continued overlap and confusion between the various TLAs being discussed. The same solution could be (and will be) called a Complex Event Processing solution, a Decision Management one and Business Event Management. What I think we will see in parallel, however, is a couple of realizations:

• Business Processes, Events (simple, complex and business) and Decisions all have a role and all should be defined and managed – and managed by the business as much as is possible
• Business rules, a declarative language for specifying business logic, are the best basis for defining all three
• Logic must be supplemented with analytic insight if any of these systems are to meet their full potential

I make no attempt to guess which phrases will gain market traction but I think these three statements will stand the test of time