By Alan Lundberg

No one would argue that the state of business today isn’t highly complex, particularly where information systems are concerned; and few would argue that complexity adds business value. A closer look, however, reveals that part of the problem arises from data integration challenges and an overabundance of data.

The irony is that advances in technology have made possible immediate access to more and more relevant data. Immediate access to a crushing load of data doesn't automatically translate to business insight, agility, and competitive advantage. In fact, without an effective means of collecting, analyzing, correlating, and applying the data, it can and does have the opposite effect–information overload.

In addition to becoming more complex, the speed at which data is being produced is increasing at the same time as the velocity and speed of business is increasing:

• Documents can be sent in 30 seconds rather than three days
• Stock trades can be settled in less than a day
• Airline tickets can be bought in 20 seconds instead of 20 minutes

At the same time, customer service response-time expectations have shortened dramatically. If you then add data associated with business processes, policies and procedures, workflow, techniques, or strategies and tactics, the combined complexities produce unmanageable amounts of information in many different formats. The current tendency to deploy discrete hardware and software solutions to address this business challenge may simply add to the problem.

Still, there is hope. The complex interrelations and overabundance of data, if leveraged properly, can provide companies with a vital strategic advantage. In fact, more companies are seeking solutions that allow them to respond in real time and to move toward predictive business, an exciting approach that makes it possible to anticipate customer needs, create opportunities, and avoid potential problems.

Based on the real-time movement of data across the enterprise, the best of these new solutions uniquely correlates information about a company’s operations and performance with information about expected behavior and business rules. This capability makes it possible for decision makers to anticipate and respond to threats and capitalize on opportunities before they occur, enabling the next step in the evolution of a real-time enterprise: predictive business.

Business operations consist of events or micro-events, the everyday millisecond-long occurrences that are the fabric of enterprise activities. A typical business may produce millions of events on a daily basis. These events can be created through employee or customer and vendor relationships, and can include data or messages that record business activity.

Traditionally, these events are captured in dedicated applications or run on their own, without significant oversight. If captured, the information they generate is often available from siloed storage that may or may not interoperate with other enterprise solutions. As organizations increasingly leverage their everyday events through event-driven architecture (EDA) and event-driven business processes, workflows, and applications, they can use new techniques such as complex event processing (CEP) to derive more value from their infrastructure and, ultimately, their operations.

This article examines the ideas and the impact of CEP on businesses, and shows that by developing a comprehensive, interrelated repository of micro-events, businesses can see trends, patterns, potential areas of opportunity, and even areas of potential threat. In short, they can identify trends or scenarios that require immediate attention to increase real-time responsiveness and operational efficiency, an immensely valuable capability. CEP is powerful because its degree of access and visibility allows businesses to anticipate or predict customer needs, make faster decisions, and take decisive action.

Link to the full article.

(The full article runs more than 5,000 words, and provides a comprehensive examination of this topic.)