Business activity monitoring (BAM) was a separate product niche until about five years ago when advanced business process management vendors began including BAM capabilities in their product suites. The objective was to close the loop of continuous process improvement by providing business users with process monitoring dashboards.
Unfortunately, BAM adoption rates remain relatively low. Forrester Research shows adoption rates to be between 20 and 40 percent among companies that have deployed BPM. Organizational politics, lack of skills, and lack of funding were found to be the primary roadblocks to BAM deployments. These issues are not entirely new as architects encountered them during the first waves of BPM and data warehouse implementations. But BAM implementations face the additional challenge of working in the operational dimension, mixing time--and individual-performance issues.
Source: Intelligent Enterprise, http://www.intelligententerprise.com