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Roy Schulte to Keynote Event Processing Symposium 2010

Big News!  Roy Schulte, Gartner Distinguished Analyst and Event Processing Thinker Extraordinaire is giving the opening keynote at the Event Processing Symposium 2010: Profiting from Continuous Intelligence.

Roy’s topic is Smart Systems and Sense-and-Respond Behavior: The Time for Event Processing is Now

“The need for situation awareness and sense-and-respond behavior is no longer limited to niche applications. Virtually every large new system in business, defense, and government is becoming event-driven in some aspects of its operation. This overview session will introduce the fundamentals of event processing, and explain where it is used and why it is a fundamental part of smart devices and smart applications of all kinds.

1. How does continuous monitoring enable situation awareness and provide earlier detection of threats and opportunities?
2. What design patterns form the basis of smart devices and event-driven processes?
3. Which technologies and product categories are applied to different event processing usage scenarios?”

The symposium, hosted by the OMG, is May 24-25, 2010 in Washington DC.  For more information, including registration, please visit the symposium website. 

If you are interested in participating in the Symposium, let me know.  Practitioner stories encouraged! 

 

[Disclosure: The OMG is a client of my firm, Elemental Links.  I am the Event Processing Symposium 2010 Program Chair.]

Express Scripts GlowCap: The absence of an event (pill taking) is an event

While an event is defined as “something that happens”, a common event processing scenario is detecting when something fails to happen.  In this scenario, a failure event is generated based on the absence of “thing happened” events. 

For us geeks, a common usage is the systems heartbeat.  A system is designed to emit heartbeat events at a specific interval.  If the event processor doesn’t receive the heartbeat event in the specified interval, a failure event is generated.  The failure event is then processed, which typically includes notification actions.

This week’s Wall Street Journal has an article entitled Beep! It’s Your Medicine Nagging You.  The article highlights pharmaceutical advances, in packaging and ingestible chips, that monitor pill taking, and absence of pill taking, events.  The majority of the piece is dedicated to Express Scripts’ new GlowCap:

“Express Scripts Inc., the big St. Louis pharmacy-benefit manager, is about to test an electronic pill container that issues a series of increasingly insistent reminders, in a national study among patient members.

The container—actually a high-tech top for a standard pill bottle called a "GlowCap"—is equipped with a wireless transmitter that plugs into the wall. When it is time for a dose of medicine, the GlowCap emits a pulsing orange light; after an hour, the gadget starts beeping every five minutes, in arpeggios that become more complicated and insistent. After that, the device can set off an automated telephone or text message reminder to patients who fail to take their pills. It also can generate email or letters reporting to a family member or doctor how often the medication is taken.

It is one of the high-tech ways companies are grappling with medicine noncompliance. Only about half of patients who are prescribed a medication for a chronic condition are still taking the drug regularly after a year, says Daniel Touchette, assistant professor of pharmacy practice at the University of Illinois at Chicago.”

…

“In about a month, Express Scripts will start a small test of the GlowCap, made by Vitality Inc., a Cambridge, Mass., maker of high-tech health packaging. Express plans a larger trial focused on drugs for cholesterol, diabetes, high blood pressure and heart failure this summer.

Bob Nease, Express Scripts' chief scientist, says the goal is to see if the gadget improves pill-taking, and also to use detailed information that the device beams wirelessly to learn more about how and why patients take—or fail to take—medication. "It is an outstanding instrument" for tracking such information, he says.

Patients using the GlowCap get reminder calls only if they opt to do so. They can opt out of having doctors and family members receive email updates. One issue the study will address is whether the device raises patients' privacy concerns, Dr. Nease says. Dr. Nease declined to comment on the study's cost or size. Participants won't have to pay for the devices, which sell online for around $100.”

Of course, just like when that on-call pager beeps, not everyone is thrilled with the prospect of chirping, and tattling, pill bottles:

“Some patients won't welcome the idea of having their daily medication monitored. Vera Karger, a retired Monroe, Conn., speech pathologist, says she wouldn't mind the lights and noises, but emails to her doctor or family would "make me feel inept, or like I was being regarded as a child."”

However, for patients who don’t, or can’t remember their pill taking, this real-world application of event processing sounds like a good idea.

Event Processing Symposium 2010: Profiting from Continuous Intelligence

Save the date!  On May 24-25, 2010 in Washington DC, the OMG is hosting Event Processing Symposium 2010: Profiting from Continuous Intelligence:

Learn how Event Processing enables agencies and corporations to profit from continuous intelligence at the Event Processing Symposium 2010, hosted by the new Event Processing Consortium.

Hear from industry pioneers, leading vendors, and early adopters on Event Processing technologies and techniques that increase mission and business visibility and responsiveness.

Interact with industry experts, leading adopters, and peers in roundtable discussions on business analysis, information analysis, management techniques, and technologies to create an environment for continuous intelligence.

Influence, participate in, and benefit from the rise of event processing as we launch the Event Processing Consortium.

I’m working with the OMG on both the Symposium and establishing the new Event Processing Consortium.  Over the next few weeks, we’ll be announcing more on each, including our superstar conference headliner.  [Hint: I’ve written about him in the last few months.]

If you are interested in participating in the Symposium, let me know.  We’ll be issuing a formal call for speakers soon.  Practitioner stories encouraged! 

 

[Disclosure: The OMG is a client of my firm, Elemental Links.]

Lessons from Van Halen: What’s your brown M&M?

In the March issue of Fast Company, Dan and Chip Heath’s column focuses on early warning indicators.  In one example, they explain why David Lee Roth banned brown M&Ms from backstage.  It wasn’t a diva thing, but rather, an operations performance metric.  The excerpt:

“Your source of data doesn't need to be high tech. In fact, it doesn't even need to be numerical. Consider Van Halen. (We have been waiting years for a chance to write that sentence.) In its 1980s heyday, the band became notorious for a clause in its touring contract that demanded a bowl of M&Ms backstage, but with all the brown ones removed. The story is true -- confirmed by former lead singer David Lee Roth himself -- and it became the perfect, appalling symbol of rock-star-diva behavior.

Get ready to reverse your perception. Van Halen did dozens of shows every year, and at each venue, the band would show up with nine 18-wheelers full of gear. Because of the technical complexity, the band's standard contract with venues was thick and convoluted -- Roth, in his inimitable way, said in his autobiography that it read "like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages." A typical "article" in the contract might say, "There will be 15 amperage voltage sockets at 20-foot spaces, evenly, providing 19 amperes."

Van Halen buried a special clause in the middle of the contract. It was called Article 126. It read, "There will be no brown M&Ms in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation." So when Roth would arrive at a new venue, he'd walk backstage and glance at the M&M bowl. If he saw a brown M&M, he'd demand a line check of the entire production. "Guaranteed you're going to arrive at a technical error," he wrote. "They didn't read the contract.... Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show."

In other words, Roth was no diva. He was an operations expert. He couldn't spend hours every night checking the amperage of each socket. He needed a way to assess quickly whether the stagehands at each venue were paying attention -- whether they had read every word of the contract and taken it seriously. In Roth's world, a brown M&M was the canary in the coal mine.

Like Roth, none of us has the time and energy to dig into every aspect of our businesses. But, if we're smart, we won't need to. What if we could rig up a system where problems would announce themselves before they arrived? That may sound like wishful thinking, but notice that it's exactly what Roth achieved. Surely, you won't be outwitted by the guy who sang "Hot for Teacher."”

As you explore active information strategies and event processing, make sure you do the business and information analysis to answer the Heath brothers’ closing question: “Where's the brown M&M in your business?”

Julian Hyde in ACM on In-Flight Data Processing with Streaming SQL Technology

Julian Hyde, chief architect of SQLstream, and lead developer of Mondrian, has a great article in Communications of the ACM on Data in Flight.  The article provides an overview of streaming query engines, demonstrates simple queries using a clickstream example, compares streaming query engines to relational database technology, discusses the advantages of streaming, and concludes with additional streaming applications, including CEP.

On streaming query engines vs. relational database technology:

“The streaming query engine is a new technology that excels in processing rapidly flowing data and producing results with low latency. It arose out of the database research community and therefore shares some of the characteristics that make relational databases popular, but it is most definitely not a database. In a database, the data arrives first and is stored on disk; then users apply queries to the stored data. In a streaming query engine, the queries arrive before the data. The data flows through a number of continuously executing queries, and the transformed data flows out to applications. One might say that a relational database processes data at rest, whereas a streaming query engine processes data in flight.”

On CEP and Streaming, Hyde states:

“Application areas include complex event processing (CEP), monitoring, population data warehouses, and middleware. A CEP query looks for sequences of events on a single stream or on multiple streams that, together, match a pattern and create a "complex event" of interest to the business. Applications of CEP include fraud detection and electronic trading.

CEP has been used within the industry as a blanket term to describe the entire field of streaming query systems. This is regrettable because it has resulted in a religious war between SQL-based and non-SQL-based vendors and, in overly focusing on financial services applications, has caused other application areas to be neglected.”

Hyde concludes his article as follows:

“Streaming query engines are based on the same technology as relational databases but are designed to process data in flight. Streaming query engines can solve some common problems much more efficiently than databases because they match the time-based nature of the problems, they retain only the working set of data needed to solve the problem, and they process data asynchronously and continuously.

Because of their shared SQL language, streaming query engines and relational databases can collaborate to solve problems in monitoring and realtime business intelligence. SQL makes them accessible to a large pool of people with SQL expertise.

Just as databases can be applied to a wide range of problems, from transaction processing to data warehousing, streaming query systems can support patterns such as enterprise messaging, complex event processing, continuous data integration, and new application areas that are still being discovered.”

If you are even remotely interested in event processing, active information strategies and/or stream processing, I highly recommend reading Hyde’s article.