Why Companies Should Develop Event Models

by David Luckham, W. Roy Schulte

Companies inherently depend upon events that are received from widely differing sources to control many aspects of their operations. They expect these operations to run in real-time. But in fact the processes that use events in the business decision making of most companies are not as automated or real time as they should be. At some stage a company (or more likely some person within the company) will realize that it could organize its business operations to take better advantage of the events that are flowing through the company.

When this happens, a process takes place in which the company gradually adopts event processing thinking and technology and becomes “event-driven”. It is usually a slow process of understanding and modifying existing information infrastructure. Personnel have to be educated in event driven methods.

This paper explains why a company should develop an event model to support its event-driven business applications. It is based on observations of current practices in several different types of business. The paper is informal and does not describe formal methods of event modeling that could be employed in the future.

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