I have had many inquiries and questions about the acronym, BAM – business activity monitoring, and the relevant meaning of this focus and the technology supporting it over the last year. BAM is an interesting evolution of industry discussion and technology that has arisen from the need to monitor transaction in applications for providing notification from conditions and thresholds being hit that need attention. Of course the acronym has evolved over the years to include other capabilities but the major thrust is about monitoring which is important but not the benefit of that is found from taking immediate action. Of course that action should be automatically managed and coordinated across both people and processes along with the underlying technology that generates information for improvement.

Now over the last ten years a lot of the BAM vendors have been acquired or migrated into new fields of focus as the focus on just monitoring business notifications and providing a dashboard is insufficient enough to grow and be a successful software company. Of course it has become a standard capability for many application servers from IBM, Oracle and the like. But for your organization monitoring is just one step in the long journey in making your operations more intelligent through being opportunistic and responsive to changing conditions in your business. How this is actually done is through being savvy on what your people need to be successful and examining the business and technology infrastructure that can grow with your operations.

I have long espoused the need to bring the analytic and smart components of business intelligence (BI) and design it to operate on an event-based architecture where the modeling can operate at a very fast and instantaneous basis or operate within the relevance of an event to the needs of the business or policies. This is what I have outlined as Operational Intelligence along with being in the Wiki and what is becoming a key business technology priority for organizations. Our recent benchmark research on Operational Intelligence found 74% of organizations are focused on optimizing business processes and 72% are focused on reducing time to respond to opportunities are most important benefits for technology investments using events, activities and processes. Only a third of organizations are not satisfied with existing technology approaches today and party due to the large number of sources that are required to be integrated together as 46% of companies need more than 11 event sources to meet operational requirements. Only 2 percent need one source to integrate. All of these facts and more spell a dead end for BAM as the technology was not designed and focused to handle the dynamic need of business.

It is not that I am raising an obvious perspective but the facts from hundreds of organizations are clear that they have graduated to more business sophisticated needs and have little time to just do monitoring and just focus on one or two sources of applications. If you have not made that simple step, even more reason to come learn from many others what they are doing to place intelligence into their operations and adopt Operational Intelligence as a category of investement for your business. If you do not, you might be facing a brick wall on your road faster than you think.

Let me know your thoughts or come and collaborate with me on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Regards,

Mark Smith
CEO & EVP Research