Over the past year, there’s been a lot of talk in the integration and business process management (BPM) industry about BAM—business activity monitoring. How can (or will) organizations monitor their business processes in real time?

You’re undoubtedly familiar with business intelligence (BI) products, and how they work with data warehouses to enable managers to slice and dice business information in thousands of ways. Unlike BI solutions that may operate off of data warehouses that are feed by non-real time batch data feeds, the goal behind BAM is to provide real-time business monitoring of key performance indicators and business processes.

Whether they buy into the BAM marketing term or not, some organizations are starting to implement these type of real-time BAM solutions—often using different approaches. A number of BPM vendors, including InterSystems with its Ensemble product, Lombardi Software, and others, offer ways to monitor business processes and the real-time flow of messages at a business level, with the requirement that you deploy the rest of their BPM infrastructure.

On the other hand, as more and more companies deploy XML-based applications or create XML connections with business partners, suppliers, or customers, other companies are coming to this problem from the XML and Web services side. Many organizations are using XML across their applications and application servers. While they frequently (but not always) have a way to monitor the XML data flows, it’s rarely at the business level. Instead, many of today’s management approaches to XML tend to take the traditional systems-management view of XML interactions—which system sent what to whom, who didn’t receive a message, and what event needs to triggered in response to a problem. Instead of providing a business level (or BPM level) perspective, many companies are left with a simplistic monitoring application that simply fires off events based on pre-set conditions.

What’s needed is another step up—to be able to go beyond the simple triggering of events, into a monitoring system that look inside the XML data flows to link the events to what’s happening at a business level. A good illustration of the difference is to step back ten years to when a variety of systems management vendors offered sophisticated systems that allowed IT administrators to monitor just about any type of event they wanted to within the IT infrastructure, and provided the ability to easily raise alarms or fire off events in response to specific conditions.