I have been wanting to write about Business Activity Monitoring and soup offers a nice segue.
I like spicy soup and no one makes it spicier than Emeril, the host of a New Orleans cooking show. There was always one point in the show where he gets to the end of the dish and “kicks it up a notch” by heaping on the spice and shouting BAM. When you heard the “BAM,” you knew something was happening.
So it is with BAM software – an acronym for Business Activity Monitoring. BAM is all about knowing what is going on in your business or in your business processes in real time.
It is the modern day equivalent of the steam pressure gauge in the factory boiler room, which provides real-time information concerning one of the more important processes in the factory — information that could also be used to diagnose certain problems… Same thing in your auto – you’ve got a little red light on your dashboard that comes on to let you know the oil’s low and to stop your car before you end up with BAM! — a very expensive cab ride home. BAM in the workplace means that a key performance indicator (perhaps an SLA) is about to be broken and you had best get on it before it does.
You get the idea. If we review the reference architecture in the WHAT is CEP series, you can liken it to the Situation Refinement or Awareness step. From this we can deduce that BAM involves reviewing data derived from business processes, a bit like the operational BI mentioned in the BI soupspoonful below. In discussing BAM and CEP, one should be aware that David Luckham, who may be familiar to some as one of the “godfathers” of CEP, has penned this article on how most BAM today is really simple event processing, and what BAM users need is detailed in this article – no surprises here, the solution is CEP!
[...] SOA gives the ability to specify services that can be used synchronously or asynchronously. They will tend to be orchestrated as part of a BPM process; more complex services may require a specific event-driven choreography [2]. Some advanced SOA architectures even give you features like service virtualization. But for the most part, SOA is associated with BPM and sequential human-oriented procedural services. One of the themes of the CEP industry is that IT systems don’t need to work like that, especially for large-scale real-time automation tasks where necessarily the human-is-not-in-the-loop. This is where EDA and CEP come into play, dealing with asynchronous and complex events and their associated patterns. One use case for this is obviously Business Activity Monitoring (keeping track, automatically, of the relevant Key Performance Indicators or KPIs). [...]