Posted on

Event-centric BPM and goal-driven processing

The slides for my Business Rules Forum presentation on event semantics and focusing on events in order to simplify process definition and to facilitate more robust governance and compliance are at Event-centric BPM.

After the talk I spoke with Jan Verbeek and Gartjan Grijzen of Be Informed and reviewed their software, which is excellent.  They have been quite successful with various government agencies in applying  the event-centric methodology to produce goal-driven processing.  Their approach is elegant and effective.  It clearly demonstrates the merits of an event-centric approach and the power that emerges from understanding event-dependencies.  Also, it is very semantic, ontological, and logic-programming oriented in its approach (e.g., they use OWL and a backward-chaining inference engine).

They do not have the top-down knowledge management approach that I advocate nor do they provide the logical verification of governing policies and compliance (i.e., using theorem provers) that I mention in the talk (see Guido Governatori‘s 2010 publications and Travis Breaux‘s research at CMU, for example) but theirs is the best commercially deployed work in separating business process description from procedural implementation that comes to mind. (Note that Ed Barkmeyer of NIST reports some use of SBVR descriptions of manufacturing processes with theorem provers.  Some in automotive and aerospace industries have been interested in this approach for quality purposes, too.)

BeInformed is now expanding into the United States with the assistance of Mills Davis and others.  Their software is definitely worth consideration and, in my opinion, is more elegant and effective than the generic BPMN approach.

Posted on

Rules vs. applications of knowledge

I was just asked for some background on business rules and the major players, preferably in the form of videos. The request came in by email, so I didn’t have the opportunity to immediately ask “why”.   Below I give some specific and direct responses, but first a few thoughts about clarifying objectives.

I don’t know of any video that is particularly good from an executive overview standpoint concerning “business rules” or even “decision management” let alone “management of active knowledge”.    My recommendation is to clarify the objective before drilling into “business rules”, which is a technical perspective.  What is it that you are trying to accomplish?  Most abstractly, it could be to manage and improve performance of an activity or an organization.  That kind of answer or focus is the right place to start and then work backwards to the technical approach rather than start with an inadequately conceived technical need.  This is one of the major problems with business rules as an independent market or product line.

Learning from Enterprise Decision Management

While at Fair Isaac, James Taylor saw this clearly.  He articulated the enterprise decision management (EDM) and positioned the business rules capability Fair Isaac acquired with Blaze Software in that space.  That is, more as a strategic objective than as a tool or technology.  This is an example of the proper way to think about business rules.

The decision management perspective was also narrowly focused on point decision making (e.g., using rules) but James and others (e.g., John Lucker of Deloitte) have appropriately expanded the strategy of decision management to include analytics, which produce and inform decision making (i.e., business rules), into a continuous process not of point decision making, but more closed-loop, continuous process improvement.  Over recent years, this has evolved into the broader market of performance management, which also includes performance optimization.

The key thing to consider when considering inquiries about “the applications and market for business rules” is the applications of knowledge.  The “knowledge engineering” community is often too focused on the sources of knowledge.  Focusing on sources rather than opportunities and benefits is a big part of why the business rules market has been subsumed into the business process management market, which is small in comparison to the business intelligence market, the fastest growing segment of which is performance management.

Semantic enterprise performance optimization checklist:

Here’s a checklist to consider when framing your considerations of strategies and tactics that might involve business rules technology:

  1. What knowledge (including policies, regulations, objectives, goals) is involved?
  2. What knowledge is superficial (i.e., derived from or approximations of) versus deeper knowledge?
  3. Will you capture the motivation for a decision rather than how that decision is made using rules?
  4. How will the performance  of your decision management or governance system be evaluated?
  5. Is the knowledge involved in evaluating such performance part of the knowledge that you will capture and management?
  6. How does the manner of evaluation relate to goals and objectives and over what time frames?
  7. Is the knowledge about goals and objectives time frames part of the knowledge to be managed?
  8. Are your decisions rigidly governed in every aspect or do you need the business process to include experimentation and optimization?

Most business rules efforts are focused on contexts so narrow that they are reduced to technical buying criteria without much or any consideration of the above.  That is, most business rule efforts do not even cover point 1 above.  Few reach bullet 2 and only strategic thinkers get to the third.

Specific recommendations for the naive question:

So I went off looking for videos…  You can find some on technical matters involving IBM/Ilog but I didn’t find any good videos from IBM at the business strategy level which concerned knowledge-based process/decision management/governance, which surprised.

A video from the vendors of Visual Rules touches on many of the traditional buying points that IT people typically formulate before evaluating vendors (here).

Although it did not respond to the inquiry, I sent along this video of James’ since it touches on so many of the aspects beyond business rules that are increasingly in vogue, even if it does not go far enough towards things like the business motivation model and the market for performance management, imo.

And for a very thorough background in the form of an analyst presentation that is consistent with all of the above, John Rymer of Forrester is most thorough in the two longer presentations that are here and there.

Please send me any other content that you would recommend!

Paul

Posted on

Tendencies and purpose matter

The basic formal ontology (BFO) offers a simple, elegant process model.   It adds alethic and teleological semantics to the more procedural models, among which I would include NIST’s process specification language (PSL) along with BPMN.

Although alethic typically refers to necessary vs. possible, it clearly subsumes the probable or expected (albeit excluding deontics0).  For example, consider the notion of ‘disposition’ (shown below as rendered in Protege):

BFO's concept of 'disposition'

For example, cells might be disposed to undergo the cell cycle, which consists of interphase, mitosis, and cytokinesis.  Iron is disposed to rust.  Certain customers might be disposed to comment, complain, or inquire.

Disposition is nice because it reflects things that have an unexpected high probability of occurring1 but that may not be a necessary part of a process.   It seems, however, that disposition is lacking from most business process models.  It is prevalent in the soft and hard sciences, though.  And it is important in medicine.

Disposition is distinct from what should occur or be attempted next in a process.  Just because something is disposed to happen does not mean that it should or will.  Although disposition is clearly related to business events and processes, it seems surprisingly lacking from business models (and CEP/BPM tooling).2

A teleological aspect of BFO is the notion of purpose or intended ‘function’, as shown below:

Function according to the Basic Formal OntologyFunction is about what something is expected to do or what it is for.  For example, what is the function of an actuary?  Representing such functionality of individuals or departments within enterprises may be atypical today, but is clearly relevant to skills-based routing, human resource optimization and business modeling in general.

Understanding disposition and function is clearly relevant to business modeling (including organizational structure), planning and performance optimization.    Without an understanding of disposition, anticipation and foresight will be lacking.  Without an understanding of function, measurement, reporting, and performance improvement will be lacking.

0 SBVR does a nice job with alethic and deontic augmentation of first order logic (i.e., positive and negative necessity, possibility, permission, and preference).

1 Thanks to BG for “politicians are disposed to corruption” which indicates a population that is more likely than a larger population to be involved in certain situations.

2 Cyc’s notion of ‘disposition’ or ‘tendency’ is focused on properties rather than probabilities, as in the following citation from OpenCyc.  Such a notion is similarly lacking from most business models, probably because its utility requires more significant reasoning and business intelligence than is common within enterprises. 

The collection of all the different quantities of dispositional properties; e.g. a particular degree of thermal conductivity. The various specializations of this collection are the collections of all the degrees of a particular dispositional property. For example, ThermalConductivity is a specialization of this collection and its instances are usually denoted with the generic value functions as in (HighAmountFn ThermalConductivity).

Posted on

Progress towards Knowledge-based Enterprises

I couldn’t agree more with these points from Giles Nelson’s article in CIO on BPM and event processing (as highlighted by TIBCO’s Paul Vincent): 

…we need to take a different view of BPM technology and try to see how it can be used to make knowledge-based business more ‘operationally responsive’… …the potential for creating real business value by bringing together the two disciplines of event processing and BPM is substantial…

As Paul notes, this follows Progress’ acquisition of Savvion (i.e., CEP vendor buying BPM vendor). 

I am glad to see other leaders pursuing the vision of knowledge-based enterprise.  As I discussed, IBM is getting there (but SAP seems out of the picture).  Will Oracle take the lead?

Posted on

What could be more strategic than process or decision management?

The folks from Knowledge Partners have a post that I found thanks to Sandy Kemsley, whose blog often provides good pointers.  This article talks about the decision perspective on business rules.  It makes some good points, on which I would like to elaborate albeit at a more semantic or knowledge-level.

Every language has three kinds of statements: questions, statements, and commands.   There are also some peripheral types, such as exclamations (Yikes!), but in business processes and decisions only declarative and imperative sentences matter.

From a process- or decision-oriented perspective, decisions are always phrased as imperative sentences.  Otherwise, the statements reflected in any business process, whether you are using BPMN or a BRMS, are declarative sentences.

Decisions are imperative sentences because they state an action to be taken.  For example, decline a loan or offer a discount.  It’s really pretty simple.  A decision is an action.  Rules that don’t take actions are statements of truth.  Such declarative statements of truth are perfect for formal logic, logic programming, and semantic technologies.  It’s the action that requires the production rule technology that dominates the market for and applications of rules.

The authors of the aforementioned article use the following diagram to explain the benefits of the decision-oriented approach in simplifying business processes:

The impact of rules on business process complexity

The impact is very simple.  If you eliminate how you reach decisions from the flow that you diagram in BPMN things get simpler.  It’s really as simple as realizing that you have removed all the “if” parts (i.e., the antecedents) of the rule logic from the flow chart.

So who in their right mind would use a business process tool to express any business logic? Continue reading “What could be more strategic than process or decision management?”

Posted on

How is a process an event?

Today, I came upon some commentary by a business rule colleague, Carlos Serranos-Morales, of Fair Isaac concerning a presentation I made at the Business Rules Forum.  During the presentation I showed some sentences that are beyond the current state of the art in the business rules industry.  Generally speaking, these were logical statements that did not use the word “if”.  (Note, however, that many of the them could be expressed in SBVR, OMG’s semantics of business vocabulary and rules standard).  Carlos argued that such statements should be more precisely articulated within the specific context of a business process. 

Here is the slide that triggered the controversy:

AI beyond Fair Isaac

Continue reading “How is a process an event?”

Posted on

Rule and event-driven business process M&A

On the heels of IBM’s acquisition of Lombardi comes Progress Software’s acquisition of Savvion.  The salient similarities are that IBM is adding BPM applications to its middleware stack as is Progress, at least with regard to its enterprise service bus offerings.  More interesting is the relationship between Progress’ complex event processing software and Savvion’s BPM.  Also of note is the vendor-provided integration of JBOSS Rules within Savvion versus the unrealized potential of IBM’s Ilog with respect to Lombardi.

We’ve written several times about the artificial distinction between CEP and BPM, their inevitable convergence, and the immature integration of business rules with business process management and event processing that inhibits knowledge-driven governance and decisioning. Continue reading “Rule and event-driven business process M&A”

Posted on

Time for the next generation of knowledge automation

In preparing for my workshop at the Business Rules Forum in Las Vegas on November 5th, I have focused on the following needs in reasoning about processes, about events, and about or over time:

  1. Reasoning at a point within a [business] process
  2. Reasoning about events that occur over time.
  3. Reasoning about a [business] process (as in deciding what comes next)
  4. Reasoning about and across different states (as in planning)

Enterprise decision management (EDM) addresses the first.  Complex event processing (CEP) is concerned with the second.  In theory, EDM could address the third but it does not in practice.  This third item includes  the issue of governing and defining workflow or event-driven business processes rather than point decisions within such business processes. 

Business applications of rules have not advanced to include the fourth item.  That is to say, business has yet to significantly leverage reasoning or problem solving techniques that are common in artificial intelligence.  For example, artificially intelligent question and answer systems, which are being developed for  the semantic web,  can do more than retrieve data – they perform inference.  Commercial database and business intelligence queries are typically much less intelligent, which presents a number of opportunities that I don’t want to go into here but would happy to discuss with interested parties.  The point here is that business does not use reasoning much at all, let alone to search across the potential ramifications of alternative decisions or courses of action before making or taking one.  Think of playing chess or a soccer-playing robot planning how to advance the ball on goal.  Why shouldn’t business strategies or tactical business decisions benefit from a little simulated look-ahead along with a lot of inference and evaluation?

Even though I have recently become more interested in the fourth of these areas, I expect the audience at the business rules forum to be most interested in the first two points above.  There will also be some who have enough experience with complex business processes, which are common in larger enterprises.  These folks will be interested in the third item.  Only the most advanced applications, such as in biochemical process planning, will be interested in the fourth.  I don’t expect many of them to attend!

The notion of enterprise decision management (EDM) is focused on point decision making within a business process.  For enterprises that are concerned with governing business processes, a model of the process itself must be available to the business rules that govern its operation.  I’ve written elsewhere about the need for an ontology of events and processes in order to effectively integrate business process management (BPM) with business rules.  Here, and in the workshop, I intend to get a little more specific about the requirements, what is lacking in current standards and offerings, and what we’re trying to do about it. Continue reading “Time for the next generation of knowledge automation”

Posted on

Behind the CEP curtain – it’s about time, not the cache

TIBCO is the CEP vendor most focused on the market for business rules, as reflected in Paul Vincent’s post here.  Although I agree with Paul that rule vendors are not currently offering enough in terms of support for long-running processes, the conclusions that he draws in favor of considering a CEP alternative to a BRMS are not compelling yet.

Paul said that rules don’t address the following that are addressed by CEP:

  1. BAM (business activity monitoring) and the other BPM (business performance management)
  2. Complex-rule processing
  3. Customer-centric (portfolio-based) decisions / policies

I am sure Paul was just being flippant, but you may notice that there is a bit of a war going on between CEP, BPM and rules right now.  Continue reading “Behind the CEP curtain – it’s about time, not the cache”