Business Process Orchestration - BAM and CEP are critical in making informed decisions

BAM - The best way to describe Business Activity Monitoring is:
The process used by a company that allows them to leverage all of the data(information),coming both into and out-of their systems,to make better business decisions. Companies use BAM for exception detection and processing, IT system performance monitoring and quality-of-service monitoring. And of course, this can be applied to any industry! BAM is used to make proactive decisions instead of reactive decisions.

Gartner coined BAM back in 2001. The term is used to describe a technology that provides "event-driven and real-time access to and analysis of critical business performance indicators. There is another more detailed subset called Complex Event Processing (CEP). Complex event processing is the ability to look at events and rapidly compute a derived event from the data. You see this used in mission critical applications and processes like financial institutions that perform high volume and automated trading. CEP allows them to track differences in pricing across multiple venues.

Here are some figures from Gartner. A Gartner survey of midsized to large banks, brokerages and asset managers with $1 billion or more of assets under management showed that 25% had BAM in production and another 25% were piloting or planning BAM projects. Of those that were using BAM, 75% said they were adding BAM projects, "which means they must be getting rewards out of the technology," Gartner's Knox said.

BAM solutions generally have three key areas:

- An Event Layer that receives large ammounts of data feeds coming directly into a companys' system.
- Processing and Filtering Layer that allows a company to identify specific (defined) events, processes or data coming through the data streams.
- The third component is a Dashboard, display interface, that provides management and monitoring of the companys' critical business processes. This tool will provide automatic triggered alerts associated to a specific business process, errors and results.

BAM is critical in making informed decisions - in real time - procatively - not reactively. In short - BAM delivers a set of concepts and principles that help companies monitor business process activities to make informed decisions - creating a competitive advantage.