Sense and respond – should humans be part of complex event processing?

reported by Joe McKendrick, ZDNet

This week, a report out of the Financial Times (cited here in the LA Times) said that a bug used in the computer models used by analysts at Moody’s Investors Service caused Moody’s to award “incorrect triple-A ratings to billions of dollars worth of a type of complex debt product.” The report alleges that the errors were not corrected even after the code was fixed a year ago.

The implication is that millions, if not hundreds of millions, of dollars in investment decisions may have been made on faulty data generated by the system. If you’ve been following the financial markets lately, it was not a good time for that.

This once again raises the question of how risky is it to take humans out of the loop of event processing? Of course, humans are fallible, and usually create the messes we then look to technology to fix. …

David Luckham joined Dr. K. Mani Chandy, Rodney Morrison, and Beth Gold-Bernstein for an informative panel discussion on the relationship between EDA (Event Driven Architecture) and SOA. Read Joe Mckendrick’s report.