Letter From the Editor David McCoy 1 April 2002 "Business activity monitoring" (BAM) is Gartner's term defining how we can provide real-time access to critical business performance indicators to improve the speed and effectiveness of business operations. Unlike traditional real-time monitoring, BAM draws its information from multiple application systems and other internal and external (interenterprise) sources, enabling a broader and richer view of business activities. As such, BAM will be a natural extension of the investments that enterprises are making in application integration. So far, BAM is a small part of the total application integration story. We estimate that, at most, 3 percent of integration broker revenue can be said to be BAM-related in 2002. Many integration vendors are without BAM strategies. This almost sounds like the business process management (BPM) story of late 1999 — calm before the storm. BPM rapidly went from obscurity to become a mainstay of application integration, driving mergers, acquisitions and new development in the process.  Read more

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	BAM Architecture: More Building Blocks Than You Think 1 April 2002 Milind Govekar   Roy Schulte As IT and business processes become more interdependent, the zero-latency enterprise will become a reality and then a necessity. There are challenges to meet, but the basic applications already exist.

Turning the Theory of BAM Into a Working Reality 18 March 2002 Milind Govekar   David McCoy   Howard Dresner   Joanne Correia The process of turning business activity monitoring from a concept into a working system has many challenges, but the business value is undeniable.		Using Filters to Sort Through BAM's Data Deluge 18 March 2002 Alexander Linden Filters are the "decision makers" of business activity monitoring (BAM). They decide what's flagged and what's not, so putting a filter together is highly sensitive work.
The Data Warehouse Gives Context to BAM's Warnings 20 March 2002 Frank Buytendijk   Milind Govekar   Gareth Herschel The data warehouse is one of several components business activity monitoring takes advantage of to do its work. BAM finds the event, but the data warehouse helps put it into perspective.		Middleware for Business Activity Monitoring 21 March 2002 Roy Schulte   David McCoy Key technology enablers of business activity monitoring include a number of middleware products. The increasing use of BAM will drive significant growth in several aspects of the middleware market.
Business Activity Monitoring: The Data Perspective 20 February 2002 Ted Friedman   Jim Sinur Much of the focus in BAM is on real-time capturing, filtering and presentation of events, but a "hidden" challenge lies in providing the data context against which events must be analyzed. A range of database styles will be required.		Five Traps to Avoid When Using BAM Agents 13 March 2002 Alain Dang Van Mien Using business activity monitoring (BAM) agents to manage business processes creates two challenges: using them consistently and accurately to collect information and managing their proliferation.
BAM Can Benefit From NSM Metrics 14 March 2002 Bill Gassman   Debra Curtis Making sense of real-time business events is a strength of business activity monitoring, which needs tight integration with network and systems management events to achieve complete results.		Business Activity Monitoring Requires Process Context 14 March 2002 David McCoy   Jim Sinur   Roy Schulte Real-time business events lacking context will limit a business activity monitoring platform's ability to respond to critical opportunities and threats. A process context must be built into BAM strategies.