Solutions

What is BAM?

A large business can easily find itself steering the boat by looking back at the wake. BAM is a software solution that provides the "now" in situational awareness. It taps existing sources of operational data to detect gaps between business goals and current performance. BAM anticipates problems and opportunities while providing insights for faster and more informed decisions. By applying "real-time" information, a BAM solution can provide unprecedented business agility.

The definitions of BAM range from simple status reporting of a business process to comprehensive monitoring and analyses of critical enterprise activities. The former tends to be a monitoring feature built into an application that offers limited reach and thus, limited value. At a minimum, a true BAM solution can be defined as offering:

• Unobtrusive observation of the business environment
• Continuous monitoring of critical performance indicators
• Timely, flexible responses to potential opportunities and risks
• Intuitive information tailored to the needs of various end-users

What does BAM do?

In many organizations various departments, people and applications hold a piece of the puzzle that would indicate a business situation is abnormal, its cause and potential consequences. A BAM solution can proactively monitor multiple aspects of an enterprise to gather information across technology, operational and organizational silos. It provides a clear, holistic view of the current operational situation and delivers information customized for key stakeholders. By providing real-time awareness, BAM enables a faster and more accurate feedback loop for resolving issues before they impact the business.

Depending on an organization's needs, BAM can be configured to interact with the business environment and end-users in different ways. A BAM solution typically offers dashboards that are tailored to the informational needs of stakeholders. It can also generate alerts, to notify a system or person that a potential issue or opportunity is developing. This notification can include the context of the situation and enough information to ascertain the root-cause and potential business impact of the situation.

When automated activities are being monitored by BAM, it can work within this environment to adjust process rules or routing, dynamically adapting to changing situations. At other times, the desired BAM action is to generate analysis of incidents that inhibit business goals. This analysis can automatically investigate the history of similar issues or correlate these findings against other monitored items. Analysis can be triggered by conditions and pushed to the appropriate recipients.

What are the Benefits of BAM?

The benefits of BAM are based on its mastery over time. BAM uses self-learning techniques such as base-lining to determine what the correct, normal situation should be right now for multiple aspects of the business. By automatically knowing normal from abnormal at any given time, BAM can detect even subtle variations that indicate an impending incident or opportunity requires intervention.

The benefits of BAM can include:

• Gain clear situational awareness by detecting gaps between goals and current performance
• Increase operational agility by anticipating opportunities and threats
• Receive the right information, at the right time for faster informed decisions
• Optimize operations to ensure SLAs and customer expectations are met
• Correlate multiple events and trends to predict future outcomes
• Improve the bottom-line by reducing operational costs
• Grow the top-line by increasing customer satisfaction and adapting for new opportunities

Getting Started with BAM

A key step in successful BAM adoption is to clearly establish where it can have the greatest business impact. Experienced vendors can assist with this assessment and help to avoid common real-time information pitfalls. When researching BAM providers it is critical to inquire about the reach of a proposed solution, its impact to existing IT investments and the vendor's BAM-specific experience.

For more information, download the Systar BAM Whitepaper today.