Combining Business Activity Monitoring with the Data Warehouse for Event-Context Correlation - Examining the Practical Applicability of this BAM Approach

Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) the term that Gartner, Inc. introduced to define systems that provide real-time access to critical business performance indicators in order to improve the speed and effectiveness of business operations. Despite the emphasis of BAM on the provision of low-latency views on enterprise performance, the literature on BAM also indicates the technical feasibility of a BAM approach that adds context from historical information stored in a data warehouse to real-time events detected by a BAM system, so as to help enterprises to improve their understanding of current monitoring scenarios. At this point there is a lack of studies that discuss the use of this approach to tackle real-world business problems. To improve our practical understanding of the potential applicability of this BAM approach, the paper will present a synthesis of existing research on BAM and data warehouse (DW) approaches to provide a basis for proposing feasible business scenarios to apply a combination of both technologies (BAM, DW). This study suggests that a contextualized BAM approach allows operational managers to respond better to the occurrence of events by facilitating a better understanding of the nature of the detected event.