As the pace and volume of digital business continue to increase, organizations are facing mounting pressure to accelerate the speed at which they do business. The ability to quickly respond to shifting customer and market dynamics has become key for contending with today’s growing digital economy.

In a survey run by IDC, a leading provider of global IT research and advice, 43% of technology leaders indicated that they were “planning to deliver innovative digital products and services at a faster pace.” [1]

Real-time intelligence helps improve responsiveness

To accelerate the speed of business, organizations should acquire the ability to access, interpret and act on real-time information about unique situations arising across the entire organization.

In the same survey run by IDC, 36% of IT leaders rated “using technology to achieve real-time decision-making” as critical to business success. [1]

The need to improve real-time decision-making is contributing to a growing demand for event-driven solutions and their ability to help businesses achieve continuous intelligence and situation awareness.

An event-driven architecture focuses on the publication, capture, processing and storage of events. When an application or service performs an action or undergoes a change, it publishes an event—a real-time record of that action or change. Those events can then be consumed and processed to help inform smarter decisions and trigger automations.

Putting business events to work

However, becoming an event-driven business involves more than just collecting events from applications and services. Streams of events need to be processed—by applying operations like filtering, aggregating, transforming or joining with other streams of events—to define a time-sensitive scenario that the business needs to detect.

To show this with an example, consider one stream of business events sourced from an order management system. This stream provides a persistent, real-time log of all orders received. Though this stream of events can be useful on its own, allowing us to detect any time a customer transacts and places an order, we can unlock more value by combining this with other streams of events to define a critical business scenario.

Now, consider processing this stream of events to filter it to new orders that have a value greater than $100 and are placed within 24 hours of a new customer account creation. Now, beyond just the notification of a transaction, we are detecting a key scenario that warrants action from the business—namely, an opportunity to foster new customer growth and loyalty. This was just one example, and business events can be collected from a wide variety of systems, applications, devices and services across an organization. But no matter the source, getting the most value out of events requires that we process and correlate streams of events together to define a business scenario.  

Get started with IBM Event Automation

By putting events to work, companies can help teams proactively respond to key customer opportunities, issues or potential threats as they arise. They can also help quickly adjust to shifting market dynamics and external factors affecting business operations, like changes in levels of demand, costs and more.

And these benefits shouldn’t be available only to highly technical teams. By lowering the skills barrier to processing events, line-of-business teams can be empowered to define and detect time-sensitive situations. This is especially important as companies continue to grapple with the impact of the Great Resignation.

In a survey run by IDC, 45% of IT leaders reported “a general shortage of people with the right skills” as “the main reason vacancies are hard to fill” for their real-time use cases. [1]

IBM Event Automation’s event processing capability is designed to be intuitive and accessible by users across the business. With it, both business and IT teams can start working with events and defining business scenarios without writing code or being an expert in SQL.

View the webinar to learn more about unlocking the value of transaction data flowing across your organization.

[1] IDC, Implications of Economic Uncertainty on Real-Time Streaming Data and Analytics, Doc # US49928822, Dec 2022