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Data On The Fly
Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) has been described as the ability to monitor, alert and act on fast-flowing data streams in near-real time. While BAM may not presently have significance for every industry, Mary Knox, research director, Gartner Investment Services Research, finds the technology improving and gaining a foothold as a critical edge in investment services firms seeking faster innovation."Early [BAM] implementations looked at less than real time data flows, monitoring unusual events in areas such as fraud," Knox says. "What companies are doing now can be far more complex," such as algorithmic, or arbitrage trading associated with hedge funds. In industries accustomed to high volume transactions, such as investment services or telecommunications, BAM is becoming a requirement for proactive identification of risks and opportunities." "It's a requirement simply because the speed of information no longer allows traditional human monitoring," Knox says. This requires a certain amount of trust in systems where exceptions lead to automated decisions, but increasingly, BAM is being applied in a business process context, which might trigger an alert or set off a workflow in a process management system.
Other industries could find BAM valuable for monitoring IT systems where exceptions quickly arise and escalate. "We look at BAM as a critical component of the 'enterprise nervous system' going forward," Knox says.
Figure 1: In your organization, what is your current level of business activity monitoring deployment?
Figure 2: For what applications are you currently using BAM?
Figure 3: Whether undertaking additional BAM projects
