How Event Processing Builds Business Speed and Agility

The speed at which business runs nowadays demands that organizations and employees alike adapt to changes faster than their competitors to increase market share. Otherwise, you might be left in the dust as other companies zoom past due to their ability to make faster decisions and course-correct with a swiftness that leaves you wondering, “How do they do it so quickly?”

This seems to be the question that leaves every stakeholder thinking, “How can we set up our business processes in a way that allows us to adapt to changes quickly? How can we empower business professionals to develop proactive skills that enable them to thrive in a dynamic environment?”

I would argue that achieving these true agile skills requires the ability to remove data silos and access business events as they happen. To reach this point, you must remove the latency between collecting data relevant to your business and bringing it in front of someone who can meaningfully act on it.

These issues can be addressed through event-processing initiatives within your business. Event-processing and data-streaming projects allow data to get into the hands of those who need it, when they need it.

Real-time data is the key here; however, it is not just about the speed at which you can access data, but also how you can transform and analyze the data to generate actionable insights. With event-processing capabilities, you can realize positive changes to both your business speed and agility.

The Need for Speed: Faster Cycle Times

IDC finds that “one of the key benefits organizations expect to gain when embarking on an EDA (event-driven architecture) journey is faster cycle times for development and faster decision making.”

In other words, organizations can increase the speed of business operations when they adopt an event-driven architecture. For example, faster cycle times indicate that a business can acquire revenue from meeting customer needs at a greater rate than competitors, and it ultimately improves customer experiences. Underlying this ability to capture market share from customers is the ability to make faster data-driven decisions in a way that can optimize their e-commerce models and improve their digital business.

To successfully do their job, business professionals need to have access to real-time data to understand what is going on within their organization. This is particularly true for those who are focused on data analytics: Accessing the right data at the right time is pivotal for success.

With event processing, data analysts can easily reduce the time between insights and actions. Most business users are accustomed to batch data analysis, but “by the time a batch analytics process has run, key data you are querying and populating your dashboards with or running your artificial intelligence/machine learning (ML) can be out of date.” Customers have grown to expect immediate business responses to satisfy their needs, and removing the time lag allows you to reach customers faster than competitors.

With the real-time data provided by event processing, data analysts now can speed up their decision-making based on relevant information.

Agility That Makes a Difference

When you think of agility, your mind might instantly think of someone who is light and quick on their feet. Businesses can and should be light and quick on their feet, too: IDC writes that “business agility is the ability for the business to respond quickly to operational or market changes.” As evident by the unexpected pandemic, global supply chain problems and the emergence of new technologies (among many other constantly occurring market changes), agility is arguably one of the most important qualities a business should develop.

Technology is key in adapting to changing market dynamics and unforeseen disruptions. Innovation is needed for your business to adapt to and overcome changes that could otherwise be detrimental to business outcomes.

With event-processing technology, business users can automate and share event flows for easier future access. Consider typical business operations, like collecting data on variations and deviations in production that can be automated to quickly notify end users when product quality is affected. Streamlining these automations allows them to be found through event catalogs, which other users can then access through their own authentication, improving the connectivity across your business. This gives your teams the ability to trigger relevant notifications when something within the business is affecting your ability to generate revenue, and increase the connectivity in your business.

Reaching Speed and Agility Can Be More Attainable than You Think

The benefits of event processing in creating a speedy and agile business can speak for themselves. However, headwinds continue to impede businesses’ ability to make the right decisions that optimize their workflows. Among many obstacles, “companies are also having to balance the need to innovate while bringing new services at a faster pace. Complicating matters is the ‘great resignation’ and a general shortage of people with the right skills.”

It’s clear that innovation needs to happen quickly to keep up with the speed of digital transformation. However, CIOs are often wary of making investments out of fear that the return on investment may not justify the cost of new technologies. With event-processing technology that emphasizes no coding, you can innovate your existing technology investments while also maximizing the value of the investment by bringing event processing to all users. With this in mind, IBM created IBM Event Automation to help businesses build the speed and agility by enabling users to work with events in a seamless, easy-to-use authoring canvas.

Maintaining a competitive edge in this ecosystem and building a truly agile framework is not easy. However, IBM Event Automation is a technology that can help businesses stay adaptable to unforeseen changes and boost business resiliency.