Best Practices: Business Activity Monitoring Adoption

Business activity monitoring (BAM) remained a separated product niche until five years ago when advanced business process management (BPM) vendors began including BAM capabilities in their product suites. Their objective was to close the loop of continuous process improvement by providing business users with process monitoring dashboards. In spite of this addition, which greatly simplified BAM implementation, the level of BAM implementations has remained relatively low — primarily because of organizational politics, a lack of skills, or unavailable funding. But BAM adoption has been increasing, and Forrester interviewed 10 companies to identify common best practices for companies planning to adopt BAM. Our research has identified three best practices: 1) create a BAM center of excellence (COE); 2) involve middle management early; and 3) choose the right metrics. We've also identified two next practices: 1) relate the COE to a business excellence team and 2) turn passive BAM dashboards into actionable dashboards.