Business Activity Monitoring (BAM)

Edgewater Technology has been developing strategies and solutions that provide organizations with the ability to monitor key business metrics in real-time. Most recently, this process has been referred to as Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), which is becoming more and more an essential tool for today’s businesses to thrive.

What is BAM?

Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) was identified by Gartner Group as an emerging trend in business processing.  BAM requires that a business identify its Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and put in place a system that allows monitoring and responding to changes.  These systems are frequently Web portal dashboards that display KPIs in near real-time combined with automated system monitoring tools that notify users, via email for example, when a KPI’s threshold has been violated.  This conceptual architecture is shown in the following diagram:

This is only one possible method for implementing BAM in your organization.  For example, there are tools available that can extract data from operational systems and present it in spreadsheets for analysis. Still another possibility is displaying KPIs on a standard HTML page rather than through a portal.

The first step in implementing BAM in your organization may be “scorecarding,” which is the presentation of historical data KPIs.  This eliminates the need for the notification engine and access to operational systems.  The Data Gatherer accesses historical data from a Data Warehouse or Data Mart (or other historical repository) and displays a scorecard against target numbers.  Your business can benefit by looking for trends in the scorecard over time and from the scorecard develop KPIs that reflect your unique needs.  Over time, access to the operational data can be instituted for real-time access to the same data that was scorecarded.

Unlike Executive Management Systems, BAM is virtually for everyone in your organization.  BAM enables your organization to respond faster to new opportunities and threats.  BAM is not just about technology, but about recognizing your business’ KPIs and implementing the right technology in place to monitor them. 

Let Edgewater Technology’s business and technology experts assist you in making BAM a reality for your company.