Business Rules Forum 2009 Winds Down
Friday, November 6th, 2009With the vendors gone the main hall seemed spacious during the morning keynote and lunch time presentations. James Taylor [of "Smart (Enough) Systems" fame] delivered the keynote address. He always has interesting insights regarding the state of affairs for agile systems design, both leveraging automated decisioning and workflow processes.
James made the point that systems need to be more agile given higher levels of uncertainty with which our businesses deal. The need to adjust and react is more critical as our business strategies and goals flex to the changing environment. Essentially he seemed to be saying that businesses should not reduce their efforts to be agile during this economic downturn. Rather, it is more important to increase agility in order to respond quickly to shifting opportunities.
Following the keynote I attended Brian Dickinson’s session titled, “Business Event Driven Enterprises Rule!” The description of the session in the conference guide had caught my attention since it mentioned “event partitioning” which was a phrase I had not heard used in terms of designing automated solutions for businesses.
I was glad that I went. Brian was an energetic speaker! It was clear that he was deeply committed and passionate about focusing on events rather than functionality when considering process automation. The hour-long session flew by and it was apparent that we hadn’t made a dent in what he really wanted to communicate.
Brian was kind enough to give attendees a copy of his book, “Creating Customer Focused Organizations” which I hope expands on the premise of his presentation today. Although quite natural as a design paradigm when building event-driven UI’s and multi-threaded applications, I have not spent time focused on events when designing the business and database tiers of applications. For me, the first step of working with his central tenants will be to try applying them, at least in a small way, on my next architecture project. (more…)