BPM / SOA Consortium Insights

Event Processing Symposium 2010: Profiting from Continuous Intelligence

Save the date!  On May 24-25, 2010 in Washington DC, the OMG is hosting Event Processing Symposium 2010: Profiting from Continuous Intelligence:

Learn how Event Processing enables agencies and corporations to profit from continuous intelligence at the Event Processing Symposium 2010, hosted by the new Event Processing Consortium.

Hear from industry pioneers, leading vendors, and early adopters on Event Processing technologies and techniques that increase mission and business visibility and responsiveness.

Interact with industry experts, leading adopters, and peers in roundtable discussions on business analysis, information analysis, management techniques, and technologies to create an environment for continuous intelligence.

Influence, participate in, and benefit from the rise of event processing as we launch the Event Processing Consortium.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing details on the Symposium and the new Event Processing Consortium, including our superstar conference headliner. 

If you are interested in participating in the Symposium, let me know.  We’ll be issuing a formal call for speakers soon.  Practitioner stories encouraged! 

SOA Consortium Podcast Collection

A topical listing of our podcast collection as of July 28, 2009.  Check out the depth of practitioner, pundit and vendor insights collected over the last two and a half years.

 

SOA Adoption

The Evolution to Simple SOA (here)

Ronald Schmelzer on Growing EA Skills and the Long Tail (here)

Smart SOA in a Tough Economic Climate (here)

2008 Case Study Contest Winners on Success, Pitfalls & Futures (here)

Cisco's Internal SOA initiative, case study (here)

SOA Value and Measurement, SOA Practitioners (here and here)

SOA and EA Programs, Practitioner Insights (here and here)

SOA Adoption & Value Research Results (Members only here)

Creating an SOA Pipeline (here)

SOA Transformation: Ready or Not (here)

Getting to the Service Oriented Enterprise (here)

The Business Case for Service Oriented Architecture - Business Network Transformation (here)

SOA Planning for 2008 by Learning from 2007 (here)

SOA Myths, Misunderstandings and Realities (here)

 

SOA in Government

Records Management in a Federal Service Oriented Environment (here)

Practical Guide to Federal Service Oriented Architecture (PGFSOA) (here)

SOA Hot Topics Roundtable: Public Sector SOA (here)

 

SOA in Healthcare

Practical Guide to SOA in Healthcare (here)

 

SOA Sustainment

Ronald Schmelzer on Growing EA Skills and the Long Tail (here)

Enterprise Modeling with SoaML (here)

Service-Oriented Design (here)

SOA Value and Measurement, SOA Practitioners (here and here)

SOA and EA Programs, Practitioner Insights (here and here)

SOA Sustainment Soapbox Derby, SOA Practitioners (here)

SOA Hard Problems and Spiral Solution Development (here)

SOA Governance Roundtable (here)

SOA Hot Topics Roundtable: Center of Excellence (here)

SOA Center of Excellence (Competency Centers) (here)

CSC's SOA Center of Excellence (Experience and Lessons) (here)

IT Needs SOA Skills (here)

SOA Hot Topics Roundtable: CIO SOA Concerns (here)

Enterprise Architecture 2010 (here)

SOA & BPM

JP Morgenthal disassembles the SOA & BPM relationship (here)

How SOA Participates in a Green World Roundtable (here)

SOA and BPM Roundtable (here)

BPM Enabled by SOA and Business Event Processing for an Agile Business Response (here)

 

SOA & Cloud Computing

David Linthicum on the Intersections of SOA & Cloud Computing (here)

 

SOA & Communications

Service Oriented Communications (here)

 

SOA & Event Processing

SOA Hot Topic Roundtable: “SOA and Event Processing” (here)

SOA Complex Event Processing Using Mashups (here)

BPM Enabled by SOA and Business Event Processing for an Agile Business Response (here)

 

SOA & Green Business, Green IT

How SOA Participates in a Green World Roundtable (here)

 

SOA & Open Source

The Evolution to Simple SOA (here)

Getting to the Service Oriented Enterprise (here)

 

SOA & Security

How to Fail at SOA (here)

 

SOA & Web 2.0 / WOA

The Evolution to Simple SOA (here)

Enterprise Data Mashups and SOA Value (here)

New SOA Consortium Podcast: SOA & Event Processing Roundtable

The SOA Consortium’s SOA and event processing day concluded with a hot topics roundtable discussion between industry experts and SOA Consortium members on the current and future relationship of SOA and event processing in the context of delivering business capabilities.

The roundtable began with the industry experts, Ian Foster of Cisco, Bruce Henderson of Savant, Ed Lynch of IBM, and Greg Peres of Sun Microsystems sharing their thoughts on SOA & event processing business drivers, technology challenges, human/organizational elements and event processing’s market timing – new or retro-technology strategy.

In their remarks, each roundtable leader called out at least one business scenario for SOA and event processing, these included manufacturing floor management, real-time customer loyalty programs, healthcare and electronic records management and business visibility. In respect to technology challenges, the conversation centered on dealing with massive amounts of information, and the requisite implications on volume, scale, filtering and security. An interesting point on the human aspect is that today’s teenagers, with their ubiquitous use of texting, are already very event aware, quick to respond to problems or opportunities delivered via an event-based mechanism.

After the opening insights, the roundtable leaders engaged in discussion with each other, and meeting attendees on a variety of topics including event-based information proliferation and privacy, event and event emitter standards, recognizing event patterns and business trends, and business confidence in automated, event-driven reactions.

As the session closed, I asked each roundtable leader to provide a design tip to architects and developers whose services need to either emit or respond to events. Their responses follow:

Ian Foster: “I think it starts with the business user, a conversation with the business user about the key events that they would want information on. You know, is it a key event, the location of that part on the manufacturing floor? Is a key event the temperature of that truck coming across the country? What are the key events? And then look at how you measure to instrument.”

Greg Peres: “Make sure that as an architect, you are choosing technologies and platforms that are open, so that the event that you generate and design are open to other technologies and integrate, so that you can process them in a variety of different ways.”

Ed Lynch: “In my experience, the technical aspect is to make the event emission extremely lightweight...Do not make it intrusive, because at the end of the day you do not want to have somebody make a performance trade-off between the emitting of the event and the driving of the transaction. On the consuming side, make sure that the event correlation engine can drive services with a standard interface. Once you do that, I think the standards on the driving side and the standards on the event emissions side – as long as they are lightweight – it becomes a ‘synthesize the infrastructure mechanism’, as opposed to an ‘integrated into the infrastructure’ mechanism.”

Bruce Henderson: “Do not be afraid to create event models. I know it is sort of the bastard child of UML to draw these little blob boxes and put event transitions between them, but I have found in the past that that is a very powerful means to be able to identify and really get a handle on what your events could and should be. And working with the business user is a tremendous leverage in that.

And I would also say that do not treat your event pipes and your event information as stovepipes. Decorate them with meta data, because at some point down the road as it was mentioned before, when you put these things out, you do not really actually know necessarily who is going to consume them or why. So make them as interesting as possible without overloading them so that they can find lots of neat homes and friends to play with.”

To listen to the roundtable podcast or download the roundtable transcript please go here.

The SOA & Event Processing roundtable discussion is the seventh and final podcast recorded at the June meeting.  Earlier, we released Bruce Henderson on SOA & Event Processing via Mashups, Ed Lynch on SOA & Event Processing via BPM, K. Scott Morrison on How to Fail at SOA, Mel Greer's talk on SOA Hard Problems & Spiral Solution Development,  Jim Johnson's talk on SOA Trends & Pipelining and David Butler's talk on SOA Transformation.

New Podcast: Savant's Bruce Henderson on SOA & Event Processing via Mashups

Adding a unique perspective to the SOA Consortium’s SOA & Event processing day, Bruce Henderson, Chief Scientist of Savant, spoke of the connection between services, event processing and mashups.  Bruce shared his thesis that many major business, geo-political and societal problems arise because we don’t know enough to avoid them.  Despite swimming in data from a vast number of sources, the inability to relate and interact with that information has organizations operating out of rear view mirrors.  As Bruce succinctly stated, “What we don’t know can hurt us”. 

Supporting his thesis, Bruce spoke of three major events, the dotcom bubble, the September 11 attacks and the U.S. housing market implosion, whose impact could have been reduced had the available, yet scattered, data been correlated and viewed in totality.   Bruce then shared his prediction, based on applying Savant’s information agility techniques to publicly available FDIC reports, that the US Banking System faces impending failures similar to Northern Rock in the UK.

From that vivid context, Bruce walked through the technical concepts to relate and correlate disparate information via microscale services, events, event classification and metadata decoration, and rich user interfaces. 

Completing the circle, Bruce demonstrated three of Savant’s mashup projects, including the US Banking System mashup that incorporates a trend visual to show mortgage portfolios, related write-offs and balance sheet strength of major US banks.

To listen to an audio recording of Bruces’s presentation and view the slides go here.

Bruce's talk is the sixth podcast recorded at the June meeting, and the second of three from our SOA & Event Processing day. 

Earlier, we released Ed Lynch on SOA & Event Processing via BPM, K. Scott Morrison on How to Fail at SOA, Mel Greer's talk on SOA Hard Problems & Spiral Solution Development,  Jim Johnson's talk on SOA Trends & Pipelining and David Butler's talk on SOA Transformation.

New Podcast: IBM's Ed Lynch on SOA & Event Processing via BPM

Day two of the SOA Consortium’s June Meeting focused on combining SOA and Event Processing to deliver business capability. Ed Lynch, Product Manager for the BPM & Connectivity portfolio, and Integration Exec for the Aptsoft acquisition, IBM Corporation, kicked off the morning by sharing his view that SOA and Event Processing come together within Business Process Management.

In building his case, Ed first called out the findings of IBM’s Enterprise of the Future CEO study, which speaks to a business environment of accelerating change, brought on by globalization, constant connectivity, doubling data and burgeoning competition. To cope with this torrent of change, executives require two things. First, they need visibility into their businesses, in real-time. Second, those businesses need to be agile. Businesses must be able to respond quickly to opportunities and threats, or risk losing market share to existing or new competitors.

With that business backdrop, Ed shared the basic constructs of event processing and then made the connection to services and business processes. In short, Ed told attendees to think of events as the “when” for the “what” of services. Business processes orchestrate the what, the services, to respond to an event, or a series of events.

Bridging the conceptual and reality, Ed described several customer examples, including fleet management, customer loyalty programs, algorithmic trading, business activity monitoring and fraud detection.

Throughout the presentation, Ed engaged in Q&A with attendees on a range of topics including management practices, data swarms, rule management and event processing futures.

To listen to an audio recording of Ed’s presentation and view the slides please go here.

Ed's talk is the fifth of eight podcasts recorded at the June meeting, and the first of three from our SOA & Event Processing day. 

Earlier, we released Mel Greer's talk on SOA Hard Problems & Spiral Solution Development,  Jim Johnson's talk on SOA Trends & Pipelining, David Butler's talk on SOA Transformation and K. Scott Morrison on How to Fail at SOA.