Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) tools provide a visual and interactive interface in knowing what's happening across the business in near- or real-time. The basic model of current generation BAM tools does simple event processing in the context of business objectives, past performances, and current conditions so that organizations can intelligently identify, and address risks and opportunities more quickly. However, the emerging sizzling trends in BAM solution sphere such as business policy monitoring, business impact analysis, and probable cause analysis are enhancing the BAM capabilities step-by-step. In a nutshell, BAM is marching towards achieving Complex Event Processing (CEP) capabilities. The article describes what CEP is and how the evolving BAM solutions will meet CEP requirements of businesses in the coming future.

What's the traffic on the payment gateway? Is it affecting customer response time? Whether stipulated leads have been contacted? Which inventory or SKU levels have been replenished? What's the shipping status? Are my service reps able to address service requests within time? Are any of the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) not met? Is the product quality under control? Are my sales reps on the field? Is the process complying with regulation or business policy? What's the service response time? What's the purchase status? Is the lead-time under control? Is there anyone trying to misconduct or carry out fraud? Are customers served in time? Any exception has arisen? Are customers able to transact quickly? A wide list of such queries keeps the line or operations managers tense. If unanswered or not addressed properly, businesses have to pay heavily in terms of unsatisfied or lost customers, penalties, missed opportunities, etc., which will eventually have long-term effects. However, a dashboard view of all their business events or processes in real-time avoids this. It gives the power to see business events/processes live on screen, which is referred as `business activity monitoring', or `operational business intelligence' or `operations performance management'.

As customers are becoming more demanding, competition is getting more intense, and it's becoming more and more difficult to access information that organizations need to effectively manage their business. Gazing into what's happening within and across business processes in real-time is an exciting capability that could optimize real-time performance management. It can keep an eye on the health of business processes across various functions. Such capability is offered by Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) solution. It requires that businesses identify their Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and put in place a system that allows monitoring and responding to changes. BAM solution, which is best within an integrated IT environment, offers a dashboard view of all the KPIs across the business processes in real-time and also alerts the concerned worker, when required. These systems frequently take the form of Web portal dashboards that display KPIs in near- or real-time combined with automated system monitoring tools that notify users for instance, via e-mail, when a KPI's threshold has been violated.

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