More Fallacy and Misinformation in CEP-Land
I thought we had seen the last of the darkest days of folly, falsehoods and hype around “complex event processing” and then I read Why does ‘complex event processing’ have to be so complex? by Joe McKendrick. Here is some of the marketing nonsense:
I recently had the opportunity to join David, along with Brenda Michelson, principal with Elemental Links, in a rousing roundtable discussion on the impacts of event processing in what has been a very eventful year for businesses. (Full transcript available here.)
For example, financial services has been at the center of the economic storm over the past 18 months. If these companies had more advanced capabilities to process and analyze key events, they might have been able to head off many of the slips and slides that led to the financial crisis of 2008, David and Brenda agreed. Still, there are many lessons being gleaned from the whole experience that will benefit all industries for years to come.“
I think [Complex Event Processing] could have been used in some situations that got us into this financial crisis,” says Olson.”Perhaps we should have employed CEP a few more years ago in order to help stem the tide of what has happened. But there’s certainly a lot of learning that’s been going on as people go back and research what has happened, to figure out what kind of rules they should put in place in the future to make it happen again.” – McKendrick & Co.
Corporate greed and excess risk taking is a human decision, not a technical one. The McKendrick article is utter marketing nonsense. Shame on you, exploiting the global financial crisis to promote CEP vendors and software!
Note: I addressed this topic almost exactly one year ago in this June 2008 post, Capital Market CEP Fantasy Land.
Filed under: CEP News and Events, Complex Event Processing
The same kind of question was asked on CEP forum a few months ago. Back in the 90’s some business rule vendors also said the same thing. I think history is on your side on this topic. No software can beat human greed, especially when there’s no transparency. The data needed to prevent this type of fraud just isn’t available, so even if a large multi-national bank wanted to prevent that type of risk taking, they can’t do it. that’s assuming they want to prevent it, which I doubt.
peter
Hi Peter,
Always great to hear from you. Thanks for the feedback. You are “spot on”, thanks. There are also other dimensions as well. I will briefly touch on just one or two aspects of this, as an illustration:
Imagine a car moving at 100 mlles per hour and a baby opens a back door and falls into the road, instantly killed. Technocrats would say “well, there should be a rule that a door cannot open when the wheels are turning so fast!! We demand auto makers change it!”. THen, ater much media support for a rule to insure doors cannot open if the car is running fast, automakers are forced to include this rule in all cars. To save money, automakers base the rule on the speed the left rear wheel is turning.
Then, a driver, driving the new breed of “super safe” cars, is driving down the road and the car flips over and a system malfunction causes the wheels to continue to run. The driver is trapped and cannot open the door to escape the fire because of a rule. The drive dies. Other driver dies. Soon, more drivers have died as a consequence of the “new rule” than before the rule was in place.
In the above crude and overly simplistic illustration, it can be seen that technology has limitations ; and where there is a benefit, a risk often appears, in a type of dualism (and often an unintended consequence).
All systems are fallible, and each constraint or rule has consequences, many unintended and unforeseen.
Furthermore, folks who want to break the rules will find always be able to find ways around the system(s); so the problem is not a lack of technology, it is a problem in morality and society, as a whole.
Another point is as you mentioned; I have found that most companies do not want to have any system in place which supercedes a certain level of human governance. I have talked to senior banking people in Asia who say “we and our customers don’t want such a detailed level of computer monitoring and recording”.
As a slightly tangential illustrative side note, I once interviewed with a large company who was evaluating me to work on biometric security. During an interview with a very strong (religious) advocate of iris-scanning biometrics I was asked my opinion. I told him that there were unintended consquences of using human eye balls for security. I told him that there is a finite likelihood that a criminal would simply pull out a person’s eyeball and take it to the ATM machine! We must consider the pros as well as the cons.
The senior person was very offended! He told me that criminals would not do that because they should know that biometric scanner s will not work without the human attached to it! Needless to say, I did not called back for another interview - not that I wanted one, as I do not respect technocrats blinded by narrow views.
To make a long story short, it was not long ago where I read a very horrific story about a victim of such a crime who had their eye ball yanked out by a criminal for biometric purposes. As I recall, nothing was stolen, but the victim lost one of their eyes. (Most of us would prefer to lose our money!!)
Anyway, I am drifting off topic.
Rule-based systems would not have prevented or even mitigated the global financial crisis, because the core problem had nothing to do with rules, or a lack of rules, it had to do with society, greed, profits and risk taking. However, at the time, all this “greed” which everyone now complains about in hindsight, was the norm for society at the time.
What is troubling to me is that there are folks out there in the software world who use such a disaster and exploit the situation to promote themselves, their company and their software. It is a type of fraud to make such unfounded (and incorrect) claims.
SO, there is more than a touch of irony in the same folks making potential fraudulent claims to be publicly talking about mitigating risk and saving the planet, as if they are “experts”.
I find this collapse of morality and integrity for the sake of selling software (profits, greed) increasing troublesome.
Thanks again for stopping by and commenting.
100% agree….. it just a big pile of crap… and the more you dig the bigger it gets!
Without going into details. my experience with pre-trade/post-trade compliance systems is similar. Most firms have it to get the government off their backs, but they don’t really want it. Many just buy a license and then don’t use it. Like you, I dislike software companies making these types of claims to sell more licenses.
peter