How Event Processing Improves Business Decision Making

by Professor K. Mani Chandy, CalTech and W. Roy Schulte, VP, Gartner Inc.
Introduction
Almost everyone wants to have an adaptive enterprise, a company that runs faster and smarter because it has “situational awareness,” can quickly “sense-and-respond” to opportunities and threats, and can “track-and-trace” important items as they go through their life cycles. What do these three management concepts have in common? They are all based on event processing.

All three of these concepts are examples of operational business intelligence (or military intelligence) in action. Each is intended to decrease the time gap between when something is knowable or predictable and when a person, device or organizational unit takes action on it. Situational awareness, sense-and-respond and track-and-trace are aspirations, sought-after modes of operation. Event processing is how those aspirations can be achieved. It encompasses a specific set of concepts, design patterns, best practices and software tools. Download – PDF