Live from Gartner BI (not really): Business Activity Monitoring and EDM

My flight was delayed yesterday and as a result I was able to hear Bill Gassman present on Business Activity Monitoring. Now clearly a business rules approach has a place in a BAM solution but Bill made a good point that the current wave of BAM projects are fairly small and most rules technology is therefore overkill.

I think two things will change this and make a proper rules technology platform (or should I say decisioning platform) essential to BAM:

• As companies implement more and more BAM projects they will discover that they have lots of rules to manage and that will lead them to a rules management technology, as it did Sun Microsystems for instance.
• Companies already implementing business rules for decisioning will not want to repeat these rules in a BAM solution. If I already segment customers based on their value to me using a rules engine, I will want to re-use those rules and that approach when deciding how important an event is that relates to a customer.

I also think that a proper decisioning platform should and will incorporate BAM-like problems using rules and predictive analytics. Complex Event Processing (CEP) is an example of this.