BAM: Giving the Decision Makers 'Instant Insight'

BAM: Giving the Decision Makers 'Instant Insight'

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Letter From the Editors
2 April 2002

Welcome to this Special Report on the evolving technologies and concepts behind business activity monitoring (BAM), and how they could radically change the way businesses think.

BAM is an emerging business strategy, formed through the bringing-together of traditional business intelligence (BI) and real-time technologies (e.g., application integration). Today, BI solutions aim to give enterprises the key information and perspective that they need to make critical business decisions. But whether these solutions offer only simple reporting or complex scorecards, varying degrees of latency, or delay, are built in to them. By the time the decision makers see the information, it may be too old to be of use. BAM promises to eliminate that latency, giving the decision makers "instant insight," buying them additional time in which to respond to critical business events. But there is a vast difference between the promise of BAM and its reality. In this Special Report, we will look at three key areas of BAM.

David McCoy
vice president,
Gartner Research

Howard Dresner
vice president and research
director, Gartner Research

Joanne Correia
vice president,
Gartner Dataquest

Architecture and Technology
	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.

Business and User Impact
	How BAM Can Turn a Business Into a Real-Time Enterprise 20 March 2002 Frank Buytendijk David Flint Business activity monitoring (BAM) can increase the efficiency of many business processes, but to get the most out of BAM, enterprises must be aware of all of its effects - and aim for the right ones.

Markets and Vendors
	BAM: A Composite Market Changing the Way Enterprises Work 1 April 2002 Joanne Correia Business activity monitoring (BAM) is not a software or services market, but an increasingly important concept and emerging set of technologies that are required to compete in today's world.