Predictable Business, are these only new buzz-words? (Part II)

It was very sad information. Michael Jackson is dead. But I’m not going to write the next tribute to the King of Pop here. This incident is an extraordinary example of the distinction between predictable business and simple complex event processing (CEP) or even business activity monitoring (BAM).

Simple example. Have you noticed the information that due to enormous increase of the internet traffic many systems like Google America thought they have been under coordinated DoS attack? The reaction of those systems was pretty simple: block users, slow down the answer times, use captcha test to distinguish between humans and bots and so on. It’s quite simple to imagine that for users those actions were very unpleasant and have caused deep customer dissatisfaction. It is difficult directly to calculate business loss caused by these activities but I can suppose, it is enormous. All that, due to the fact that those activities were based on simple (complex ;) event processing, simple rules that have stated “if traffic increases than block users etc.”. What a bummer!…

The idea of predictable business is much more sophisticated but the basics are pretty simple:

Predictable business concentrates on the uncertainty of the process. Only the growth of uncertainty can cause the process to be difficult to predict or even unpredictable at the end.

Let be back to Michael Jackson. Was his death unpredictable? No. Was his influence on the information world unpredictable? No. So the “unexpected” growth of the internet traffic due his death was a normal and quite obvious behavior of the process. Nothing unexpected or uncertain was there. But the reaction of the security systems was in this context completely wrong. Be careful using CEP or BAM as a base for your business decisions. It could cost you a lot of money.

The predictable business is the cure. Stay tuned…