Monitoring the process

Business Activity Monitoring, or "BAM", is a buzzword that is bandied around a lot by consultants and management, but unfortunately, it is generally poorly understood. Usually, this results in business process management projects being told to, "do some BAM", but this vague instruction is open to interpretation and often leads to poorly-thought out implementations that don't provide anything valuable.

So, before we dive in and, "do some BAM", we'd better understand exactly what we are talking about. In reality, there are three different sides to process monitoring:

• Process management

• Process metrics analysis

• Process forecasting

You'll notice that none of these actually include "Business Activity Monitoring". I have deliberately shied away from this catch-all terminology in order to work with a tighter definition of what we actually want to achieve by monitoring our process. The combination of these three elements will encompass everything that is usually meant by "business...