During today’s event processing roundtable on ebizQ, Joe McKendrick asked us to comment on the relationship, or continuum, between complex event processing and business intelligence.  I went first and spoke of a continuum (or flow) that exists with the introduction of an active information tier.  Instead of viewing CEP in silos for a particular business application, I advocate the creation of an “active information tier” which is minimally comprised of raw (unprocessed) events, notable (filtered, promoted, processed) events, event interpretations and event-driven action triggers.

Using this active information tier, you can take better-informed actions for your business today, and make better-informed decisions for your business tomorrow (future). 

An interesting point that David Olson of Progress made in his answer concerned the role of business past in making decisions about your future business.  As we all know, business intelligence / decision support is highly dependent on historical business data.  David pointed out that organizations employing CEP not only get the benefit of taking the right action today, the correctness of the action also contributes to a higher quality of business history, and therefore strengthens business intelligence results for tomorrow.

So, even if your active information tier (or CEP implementation) doesn’t initially extend to business intelligence, you are still improving business intelligence input, and one would hope, output.

Below is my quick attempt to illustrate the above.

 

Thanks Joe and David for the insightful conversation!