Business Activity Management (BAM) is an important area for growing businesses to embrace. IT is basically the act of observing key processes in a business and being able to proactively respond to issues.
In this session Mick Badran (local BizTalk guru and MVP) along with Rahul Garg (Microsoft Technical Specialist) took us through an introduction to using BizTalk to implement BAM.
The functionality is largely OotB (Out-of-the-Box) in BizTalk 2006 R2 and is easy to implement.
The need for proper BAM will be decided at each organisation, usually the larger ones, and will require analysts to first work out what needs to be observed. Then it is handed over to the developers to implement using BizTalk orchestration. The general result is a tracking portal that allows activity searches, reporting, queries and alerts (eg even a Vista gadget for displaying summary information).
Why BAM?
- It is becoming more necessary in companies, especially as timeframes are continually squeezed
- Companies are requiring real-time activity information
- The cost of the technologies available are allowing it to be implemented cheaply
- The cost of not implementing may be high for companies due to lost revenue, opportunities, etc
Why BizTalk?
- Easy to implement OotB
- Feature set is growing in future versions
- Mature toolset
