Governance.... The key to success

The best of Tools & Technologies used are not sufficient alone to implement an effective Event Driven Architecture unless proper Governance is enforced.With the potential of hundreds and thousands of events being published and subscribed and a few more thousands of sets of rules acting on these events, It makes sense to have a process in place to manage these events and rules effectively. In other words, we need a events and rules repository.

Events repository in its simple form should list all the events, the publisher of the event, a simple definition of the event, the list of subscribers to the event. It can be extended to include the attributes of the event, and the attributes the subcribers are interested in.

Tibco recommends using event attributes instead of payload to improve the performance, hence the more thought given upfront defining the event and the attributes and also ensuring proper checks to avoid duplication of events facilitates successful implementation of EDA.

Likewise, a repository is also required to manage rules. Rules should be organized by domain, rule type to facilitate ease of management. Proper procedures should be in place for change management and rule impact analysis. Defining roles and workflow to manage rules will enhance the checks and balances.

Finally, the collaboration between different domains within the organization holds the key for a successful implementation of enterprise Event Driven Architecture. Establishing proper communication mechanisms between different stake holders and understanding dependencies and relationships among various business processes are also equally important.