The Essence of IT

All information is essentially about events. The data that we compile may be perceived as attributes and relations about things, but, in essence, each datum added to our growing world of information is an observation about an event. We exist in a four-dimensional space-time and the facts that give us information about that space-time continuum, reduced to their essential atoms, are events. In the same way that a point in three-dimensional space is a location, each point in a four-dimensional space-time is an event. This blog is about the future of information processing as the accumulating, aggregating, and pattern-finding of events into higher levels of data, knowledge, and, ultimately, wisdom.

We will explore how events, those points in space-time, can be harnessed by us to usher in a new world of business insight. Pursuant to this endeavor, we will develop a universal architecture for the processing of events. Our design will demonstrate how the information needs of every kind of business, from real-time manufacturing to internet analytics, can be served by its utter simplicity.

This approach to event processing, however, will diverge greatly from the current orthodoxy know as Complex Event Processing (CEP). CEP is well documented in such works as The Power of Events, by David Luckham, Event Processing: Designing IT Systems for Agile Companies, by K. Mani Chandy and W. Roy Schulte, and Event Processing In Action, by Opher Etzion and Peter Niblett. These very well written works all contain the same limitation – they require event processing to be complex while, conversely, it must be simple to become a major contributor to our world of information. While the existing literature finds complexity to be a necessary part of empowering event processing, it will be demonstrated here that this complexity is inhibiting its universal adoption, leaving the information processing world wanting for a simple solution.

By applying Occam’s razor, and making event processing only as complex as it needs to be and no more complex, we will develop an architecture that makes it irresistible to business analysts, IT professionals, and accounting staffs. In following posts to this blog, we will discover an architecture that, while consisting of only one universal event type and a simple configurable event router, will take the complexity out of Complex Event Processing and make the atomic facts of our four-dimensional world the foundation of all IT.