Business Event is a new name for a well-known, proven concept. It is a message that contains all of the information about a business transaction. Messages can be sent to different parts of an organization to initiate actions based on the message content. This is called an Event Driven Architecture.

Dell Computer and Federal Express are two companies that drive their businesses with event driven architectures. These companies have world renowned IT organizations that have pioneered building real-time business systems. From Dell’s website a customer can configure a custom notebook to exact specifications, and then press a Buy button to execute a purchase transaction. In the back office, a Business Event is created which contains a new Notebook business object. The event is sent to Manufacturing, Sales, Marketing and Inventory to notify those groups of the transaction. The event carries all of the information about the notebook, and Dell actually begins the process of building your notebook to your specifications soon after you press the Buy button.

The ObjectRiver Master Data Management system creates the infrastructure needed to implement an event driven architecture for your business. It creates business events that contain all of the business objects and updates that are part of a transaction. These events are put onto a database queue called a Business Event Factory.

Business Event Factory

The business event factory provides a centralized feed to drive an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).

Business Event Life Cycle

The ObjectRiver business event factory produces Java Message Service (JMS) messages that can be managed by routing rules to determine where the events will be sent. Business events are then delivered to interested subscribers using the corporation’s enterprise message bus.

For example, here is a list of places where business events could be sent in order to complete a business event life cycle:

• Events can be sent to downstream data warehouses, business intelligence systems, and reporting databases to keep those systems up to date.
• Events can be sent to multiple production silos to synchronize changes that may have come from web portal applications or warehouse cleansing operations.
• Events can be sent to a workflow engine that creates additional transactions based on the event’s contents.
• Events can be sent to a replication server that is responsible for creating a duplicate copy of the master database.
• Events can be sent to a Business Analysis Monitor (BAM) to drive a real-time dashboard monitoring system activity.

Business Object Auditing