Using Event-Driven Architecture to Change the Pace of Business

Key Findings

• The fundamental purpose of notification is immediate information dissemination. When a business event (any happening that is meaningful to the business) occurs, the news is sent to one or more people, systems or devices to whom the event is relevant.
• The use of EDA in mainstream business processes and application design has lagged where it should be because analysts, architects and software engineers sometimes fall back on more-familiar batch or data-centric design patterns where EDA would have worked better.
• EDA is the foundational design pattern in many of the processes used in agile enterprise, zero-latency enterprise and real-time enterprise strategies. Companies will use EDA more as they evolve toward always-on, continuous processes that respond more quickly to customer requests, competitors' moves and other events in the internal or external environment.

Recommendations

• Use EDA in circumstances where people, systems or companies must react quickly to external stimuli whose timing or nature cannot be fully anticipated.
• Use one-event-at-a-time EDA for implementing asynchronous applications, straight-through processing (STP) and some data synchronization scenarios.
• Use complex-event processing (CEP) — the computational aspect of event processing — to distill the information value from multiple events.

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The common alternatives to EDA are:

• Disconnected "islands" of information
• People or systems connected through batch data transfer
• People or systems that share a common database

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Some examples of EDA use scenarios include:

• Database synchronization
• Updating information with a business partner
• STP
• Partially automated processes
• Monitoring and situation awareness

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EDA brings obvious benefits:

• It hastens the response to significant events by reducing "information float" — that is, the time between when new information is captured or detected in one place and when it becomes available for use elsewhere.
• It improves the quality of the response by eliminating situations where decisions are made without the most current data.

EDA also brings some less-obvious benefits:

• Processes can be monitored more closely using business dashboards and other BAM mechanisms, because notification messages can be readily tapped as a source of information about the progress of the work flowing through a system.
• The elapsed time of a process can be reduced by running some activities concurrently, because a notification can be delivered to multiple people or systems simultaneously.

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