Digital transformation has long been seen as the holy grail for businesses in all industries, governments, and cities alike. The problem is, due to the complexity of digital transformation, these efforts are often disjointed and misaligned, with business and IT professionals often having their own understanding of what the business needs. In order to successfully digitally transform, organizations must change the way they conceptualize their product or desired outcome. Queue event storming.
What is Event Storming?
Event storming, in its simplest form, is a way of doing requirements gathering from business teams. It involves getting the right blend of IT and business-minded individuals in the same room and identifying the main “events” in an organization, the causes of those events, “commands”, and subsequent actions to be taken in response to those events, “reactions”. This creates a common framework for business-level requirements to be represented in the foundation of the application architecture. A basic example of this framework can be seen below:
Once you have the commands, events, and reactions laid out it is then much simpler to implement a Domain-Driven Design (DDD) approach (when the structure and language of software matches that of the business domain it serves) and begin to build your business ecosystem.
Advantages of Event Storming
Aligns Business Leaders and IT Systems
One of the biggest challenges for many businesses is the disparity between business and technical minded individuals. In extreme cases, the company may be marketing something completely different than what the engineering team is developing.
Bringing together representatives from all parts of the company for an event storming session when launching a new product or business initiative is a great way to ensure company-wide alignment.
Fast and Intuitive
The digital transformation of any organization is not an easy task, even for the most well-versed technical gurus. A major benefit of event storming is the simplicity and speed at which these sessions can be conducted, and outcomes implemented.
By stripping away complicated code and technical terms and focusing on the clear-cut business events, commands, and reactions anybody can understand what’s going on. This intuitiveness of event storming makes it a great way for people in the company who normally wouldn’t be involved in product or application design to bring new insights to the table from their areas of expertise.
Drives Event Thinking
Conceptualizing and developing applications using event storming naturally leads to your business processes/application being organized as a series of events. This “event thinking” has many benefits, such as increased speed and flexibility when updating or adding new modules to your application. Businesses in the modern age need the agility and flexibility that event thinking provides, by using event storming you can ensure you are on the right path to successful digital transformation.
Take Event Storming a Step Farther with VANTIQ
Once you have completed the event storming session and have a framework of your application/business, what comes next? For many organizations, the answer is nothing. You need to be able to quickly take this framework, apply logic/code to it, and successfully deploy it in the field; however, this is easier said than done.
Doing your event storming session in the VANTIQ System Modeler allows you to easily take that next step and apply low-level code/logic to your framework. By using VANTIQ’s low-code tools your development time goes from months to a matter of days or weeks. VANTIQ also utilizes the Event Catalog, to save important business events to be easily incorporated into future projects.
Learn more about how VANTIQ enables you to quickly expand your event storming session into a real-time, event-driven application in our free whitepaper, Event-Driven Systems:
