Event Based Architectures and Complex Event Processing (CEP) are an increasingly prominent part of today's advanced enterprise architectures. The event-driven process is one of the  seven important process usage patterns. Organizations use the pattern to interact and respond to a growing volume of business events and transactions on a daily basis. To create an effective event-driven process, you will need a new kind of analysis.

Event analysis is an emerging area of business process modeling that develops support for the decision-based processing of enterprise-significant events. It is also increasingly an essential part of strategies for the evolving Internet of things and crucial aspects of modern architectures in High-Consequence Systems Architectures, including C2 applications such as situational awareness.

Chandy and Schulte define "A business event is an event that is meaningful for conducting commercial, industrial, and governmental or trade activities." The event we refer to here is not the various BPMN events of the circular kind. We are referring to events that occur outside the walls of the organization. An event is Boolean in nature; it either happened (True) or not at all (False). The event is meaningful because it might affect a business process. It provides an external message or a channel that several processes must consume, activate and respond.

Do not confuse the business event with complex event processing (CEP). CEP is an approach to deselecting events that reveal the event with a SQL-like language.

Consequently, we have a new metaphor that is indispensable in business process modeling: the business event. The table below lists the key distinctions between the three business metaphors.

There is an excellent recent review of knowledge management as written by Fahmi Ibrahim (here). I was struck by the parallels between KM and business rules, so I 'borrowed' his conclusions and mapped them to my understanding of the business rules industry.

I think business rules should support an expanded view of business rules in the enterprise-one that encompasses and moves beyond supporting a process decision (or endless meetings that might make that someday). New metaphors, especially events, are on the horizon. As with every method, the complexity of the situation will significantly expand. To survive, the business rules approaches should reduce complexity and increase transparency with today's model-driven approaches.

As Sandy Kimsley pointed out in her links, Ken Swensen responded to the question, is BPM Dead? In all of our discussions of technology, business processes, business rules, business events, it is easy to lose focus on the basic worth of business process management.

Therefore, it is useful to review the differences between function- and process-orientation within organizations. Most organizations, that use BPM, intend to become process-centric. Organizations with a robust process focus are distinguished by having a extensive, cultural process orientation. Big, complex organizations consider the process focus as extremely important, and this system is particularly common in insurance, healthcare, and financial services. A functional organization orientation, on the other hand, is more prevalent in small enterprises and is well-suited to the way they handle business.

A functional organization is an organization that delivers a strong capability in a limited number of functions. These might include highly specialized product and skills where knowledge or availability is limited. Obviously, a functional focus works for them.

Each focus,functional versus process-centric has advantages and disadvantages. In his admirable work on business process management, James Chang created the table below that summarizes the differences between organizations adopting each focus. A functional organization allows an easier balance of work among workers with functional excellence because they all have similar skills. This organizational style outlines natural, comprehensible ways that each task should be performed and assigns this to the appropriate proponent.

Table 1 Benefits and Drawbacks of the Functional Versus Process orientation in organizations (Business Process Management Systems, Chang).

Conversely, a process organization enjoys improved communication and collaboration and may therefore be highly responsive to market requirements. Further, performance is easily measured across the process organization, as it is stated in terms of process goals. However, process organizations suffer from lack of or poorer quality communication between the different functions relative to their functional counterparts. There is reduced end-to-end focus, as opposed to the functional structure. Moreover, there may be considerable duplication of functional expertise, inconsistent functional performance between processes, and increased operational complexity. This may make the structure of the process-based organization redundant and bulky.

- Tom Debevoise