Bambi

The Register has a frivolous piece on Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) that makes a good point

Philip Howard correctly observes that simply monitoring key statistics of your business without any context is pretty useless and that you really need some analytics to go alongside. He recommends applying Business Intelligence techniques but the point is more general..... the real value of Business Process Management and Business Monitoring comes when you can intelligently make use of the data you're collecting. You inventory is x. So what?

Are you meeting your key performance indicators? Is your profitability good? Are your revenues on target? Where are we compared to the same time last year? How many orders have we processed this month compared to last month? What proportion of our applications required a manual approval? Is this down on last week? Did the process improvement we implemented deliver the benefits promised?