This is EDA! Model your business events right and have their software representations travel in real-time through a global (enterprise wide) data space (call it an ESB), then you are offering your business huge opportunities. Think of connecting your global data space with those controlled by other enterprises: your fantasy is the limit.
EDA is more a manifestation of finite state machines going all the way back to Alan Turing. Old_State + Event = Some_Action + New_State. It is the simplest, yet most powerful way to design robust systems. I only wish more people would give it due consideration.
A very old implementation example is I/O interrupts (hardware events) for asynchronous I/O - real time event handling which enabled multitasking operating systems.
Many want to use web services for everything now and at times it is hard to convince people that other messaging schemes and standards are a better fit for some problems.
Business Process Management (BPM) und Business Rules Management (BRM) zusammen in einer service-orientierten Architektur (SOA) sind die methodischen und technischen Voraussetzungen, um Geschäftsprozesse zu industrialisieren und agil zu sein. BPM schafft die Automatisierung und Standardisierung von Geschäftsprozessen, BRM die Standardisierung und Transparenz von Management-Politiken und -Prinzipien. Und eine SOA bringt die Service-Orientierung, die uns erlaubt zwischen spezifischen Logiken einzelner Prozesse und prozessübergreifenden Logiken gebündelter Kompetenzen und Dienstleistungen sauber zu trennen. Das schafft Agilität zusammen mit Industrialisierung.
J. Schiefer, S. Rozsnyai, C. Rauscher, and G. Saurer. DEBS '07: Proceedings of the 2007 inaugural international conference on Distributed event-based systems, page 198--205. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2007)