This is the fourteenth edition of our weekly BPM 2.0 post. Today, I will try to explain why a BPMS should include a real-time BAM platform. In a nutshell, the reasons are the same as why a BPMS should include a Business Rules Engine and which were heavily debated following last week’s article.

First, there is no standard way of integrating a BPMS with an off-the-shelf Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) platform. If you think that a standard event interface will do the trick, you should think twice. The reason for this is pretty simple: aggregating events without the map of the process that is generating them at the first place is like re-inventing the wheel everytime you put a new process into production. And because there is no standard format for exchanging process models — BPMN is too little, BPEL is too much, and XPDL is off-base — your best bet is to go with a BPMS that supports BAM out of the box.

Second, much like the lifecycle of business rules must be synchronized — read my lips: synchronized, not aligned, syn-chro-nized — with the lifecycle of business rules, the lifecycle of business metrics must be synchronized with the lifecycle of business processes they relate to. Old-fashioned workflow metrics could not care less about process data and dynamic schemas, but this is not true anymore with BPM, or at least not with BPM 2.0. Having the BAM infrastructure part of the overall BPMS platform addresses this lifecycle issue.

Third, a BAM tool is actually the best helper you can get for process debugging and simulation at design time. Having it tightly integrated with your process design environment is a good way to achieve Zero Code and One Click Deploy for end-to-end processes, throughout their entire lifecycle.

And much like Intalio|BPMS does not include a business rules engine yet, it does not provide out-of-the-box integration with the BAM platform we decided to use moving forward — Celequest. This is something that will have to be developed through our Demand Driven Development process, and I invite you to join our developer’s community to learn more about it.