Book Review: Event Processing in Action

Book Review: Event Processing in Action by Opher Etzion and Peter Niblett: Publisher- Manning: ISBN - 9781935182214

As the name suggests, book covers basics of event processing independent of language and underlying technology framework. Before starting this book, my impression about event architecture was colored by TIBCO’s technology stack. But after reading event has larger mind share from my side.

Book is divided into three parts covering almost all parts of event based architecture or in authors’ terms event processing. Opher manages a blog (http://epthinking.blogspot.com) which is very good source of information. He is also active member of Event Processing Technical Society (http://www.ep-ts.com) which is one of the most active site for Event Processing technology.

Book strives to develop a notation based language for Event based systems modeling but it requires more efforts and time to reach wide acceptance like UML or BPMN. Nevertheless, book is excellent in its content and approach.

I surely recommend this book to anyone who is involved in any form of event based architecture.



Disclaimer: I did not get paid to review this book, and I do not stand to gain anything if you buy the book. I have no relationship with the publisher or the author.

Further reading: Competing books are Event Processing: Designing IT Systems for Agile Companies by K. Mani Chandy and W. Roy Schulte http://www.amazon.com/Event-Processing-Designing-Systems-Companies/dp/0071633502 and Event-Driven Architecture: How SOA Enables the Real-Time Enterprise by Hugh Taylor, Angela Yochem, Les Phillips & Frank Martinez http://www.amazon.com/Event-Driven-Architecture-Enables-Real-Time-Enterprise/dp/0321322118

One can get more information about book and related topics from:

1. Book’s web presence http://www.ep-ts.com/EventProcessingInAction
2. Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Event-Processing-Action-Opher-Etzion/dp/1935182218
3. Flipkart: http://www.flipkart.com/event-processing-action-opher-etzion-book-1935182218
4. Hans Review: http://hansgilde.wordpress.com/2009/12/02/first-thoughts-on-event-processing-in-action
5. Author’s (Opher) Blog: http://epthinking.blogspot.com
6. Opher at Twitter: https://twitter.com/opheretzion
7. Publisher – Manning: http://www.manning.com/etzion
8. Event Processing Technical Society: http://www.ep-ts.com

Book Review: Digital Identity by Phil Windley: Publisher- O’Reilly

Book Review:  Digital Identity by Phil Windley: Publisher- O’Reilly: ISBN: 0-596-00878-3

Phil was CTO for Utah state of USA and implemented Identity Management Systems there. During the course of book he reveals his learning which should be useful any big decentralized enterprise.

Book consists of twenty chapters spanning from introduction of Identity Management to various concepts of Identity Management is sufficient depth. The best part of book is that it does not lean to any vendor specific solution and provides conceptual level understanding of Identity Management.

Book is nearly 5 year old, so does not provides information about latest developments in Identity Management like OpenID, CardSpace etc but concepts outlined still hold good.

I recommend this book to get high level understanding of Identity Management.

Disclaimer: I did not get paid to review this book, and I do not stand to gain anything if you buy the book. I have no relationship with the publisher or the author.

Further reading:

One can get more information about book and related topics from:

1. Author’s website: http://www.windley.com
2. Book’s web presence http://apidesign.org
3. Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Identity-Phillip-Windley/dp/B002AWX8B4
4. Publisher – O’Reilly http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596008789
5. Wikipedia on Identity Management: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_management
6. Book at FlipKart: http://www.flipkart.com/digital-identity-phil-windley-book-0596008783

7.      Identity Management white paper by  Skip Slone & The Open Group Identity Management Work Area

8. Novell Identity Manager: http://www.novell.com/products/identitymanager/
9. Windows Identity Foundation: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/security/aa570351.aspx
10. Oracle Identity Management: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/id-mgmt/overview/index.html

Few Questions to CIO/CTOs

1. What percentage of your IT budget dedicated to:

• Human Resource

• o Employee
• o Contractors
• o Consultants

• Outsourcing – Off shoring, Near shoring, On shoring
• Internal training/ workshops
• External training/workshops/seminars
• Proof of Concepts
• Demonstrations

• Centre of Excellence
• Software maintenance
• o In house developed
• o Packaged
• New software development
• o In house developed
• o Packaged
• Hardware maintenance (servers, printers, desktops, network, etc)
• o Employee managed
• o Outsourced managed
• New hardware procurement (servers, printers, desktops, network, etc)
• Help desk

2. What percentage of your IT budget dedicated to:

• Innovate
• Respond to competitive threats
• Optimize IT for existing business processes
• To keep status quo
• All other activities

3. What percentage of budget focuses on long terms IT strategy and on short term tactical decisions?
4. What percentage of projects requested by business that cannot be accommodated each quarter/year?
5. What is the financial impact of not accommodated projects – On IT department, Business units and Enterprise?
6. What percentage of data is not good enough (or incorrect) and its financial impact?
7. What percentage of IT dept activities is not compliant to regulations? What would be the financial impact on enterprise if this will ever become a challenge/issue?
8. What percentage of activities/tasks are person or small group dependent?
9. What percentages of IT systems are outdated and are on unsupported tools/technologies/platforms?
10. What percentages of Business processes are on outdated and unsupported tools/technologies/platforms?
11. What percentage of systems cannot be changed without significant risks due unavailability of documentation and original team?
12. What is the cost of maintaining teams to change systems if required ever?
13. What percentage systems to be touched to accommodate a change request from Business (Simple, medium and complex nature)?
14. What percentage of license cost, using Open Source systems can be saved? Its impact on resource and maintenance cost.
15. What percentage of development and license cost can be saved using:
a. Out sourcing
b. Cloud (SaaS, PaaS and IaaS)
16. What is the cost of not leveraging 3rd party capabilities (business/technical services, components, data, etc) due to difficulty in integration with existing systems?
17. What is the smallest size of project IT department can handle in cost effective way?
18. What is the incremental cost to enterprise of not being able to adopt tools/technologies/platforms that exhibits lower Total cost of ownership (TCO).
19. How effective IT department is capturing matrices, which can be used to improve business process in IT departments and beyond.
20. How many projects overshoot from budgeted time and money?
21. How integrated the IT strategy with business strategy?