Do you remember the term BAM? BAM is an acronym for Business Activity Monitoring. It was a hype topic in the early 2000's. And then we didn't hear that much anymore about this topic. Yes, there are several vendors out there, providing different types of solutions. And like always, there are several vendors who claim to be the leaders in the category of BAM.
When BAM became a hot topic some 10 years ago, the implementations were nothing else than a little advanced analytics. That was, at that point of time, far away from my expectations which were around intelligent, automated, real-time and ex-post analysis of relevant activities in business systems and the identification of critical changes which require intervention. For sure automated reactions as well as alerting should be part of this.
The term BAM came to my attention again when talking with MetricStream recently. MetricStream is one of the leading-edge vendors in the GRC market. They are one of the "Enterprise GRC" vendors (Business GRC would be the better term). But in contrast to many others, they allow for a tight integration with IT systems and IT controls. Based on that, they are able to use automated controls of virtually any type and map this into their system. That in fact allows to integrate what I had expected from BAM years before with a holistic GRC approach. By the way: MetricStream has a pretty high rank on my list of GRC vendors...
When looking at the BAM market I have to admit that there has been evolution since the early years of BAM. There is much more automation than pure analytics, there are several interesting solutions out there. However, MetricStream is somewhat unique with enabling this (without talking about BAM) in the context of Business GRC and thus allowing to add this as a generic approach into what every organization has to do today: Building a GRC infrastructure, with manual and automated controls - where automated controls should provide what BAM has been promising.
I assume that several of you have another opinion - so I'm looking forward for your comments.