(Nice photos Dan......I think we're all looking like we're caught in headlights, unable to hop away :)

In transit with a little time to spare I thought I'd share some thoughts around an area that is set to boom in the near future - 'Business Activity Monitoring'

I know you must be thinking - What? why? who....? what's Mick on about.

Let's have a quick chat on my thoughts:

1. Within the next 3 yrs there is going to be even less 'custom raw code' being written and more 'integration code' within the MS product stack. Of course there will be specific needs, but in general across the board for business related applications - why build it from scratch? will be the reasoning.
   
   We can see this today heavily with the Sharepoint boom - why build an ASP.NET app when you can plug your bits into a WSS V3.0/ASP.NET app?
   
   Many other products such as OCS, Speech Server, MOSS etc etc. are all conducive to integration code. (If you don't have to write 20 000 lines of code - integrate and customise and write 2000. But us developers want to do everything by hand....so in some ways, we're our own worst enemy)
   
   It would not be uncommon to have several products making up a solution.
   
   How do we keep an eye on that? (We could send the work experience kid around the the servers to make sure they are all running well? but how many work exp. kids do we have?)
   
2. BizTalk Services - if we look at the increasingly important role that BizTalk is playing within organisations in providing THE Application Server where WCF Services, Business Processes etc can all be hosted within. Out of the box slicing and dicing of load/capacity and so on. (It will be an interesting time when the finer details are nutted out with IIS 7 WAS - who does what)
   
   As we start building all sorts of systems that require point to point or connectivity between the components, typically we would look to WCF to provide that glue while conforming to standards (e.g. WS-*) future proofing extensions.
   
   We would then need to house those WCF Services and IIS could be an option...... BTS provides fault tolerance and durability around these services as well.
   
   BTS provides not only connectivity at the transport level, but also at the application level such as SAP, Siebel.... all out of the box. Being able to consume, transform and publish services/information at all these levels is one of the things that BizTalk does very well!
   
   Looking into BizTalk Services - things like 'Event buses' and 'Subscribing' to these events seem to be possible. These may span end-to-end on the enterprise so departments will be able to do their own local processing from a 'corporate received event' (just my thoughts at this point) - similiar to MSMQ technology, but with ALOT more functionality.
   
3. Ok - onto the chase....(just had to go and pick my mobile up in the airport lounge - left it somewhere....head's not screwed on right :)
   
   So in essence looking within the next 3 years, systems will be made up of many disparet sub-systems each - we need to get a view of "How are we going?" (in a business context - not the flux capacitor is running well)
   
4. Enter BAM (BizTalk) - Business Activity Monitoring:
   1. Allows for the creation of 'SQL OLAP Cubes' from Business Key Performance Indicators (a business person *can* sit down in Excel and define all these numbers - except my winning lotto numbers...I'm still waiting :) - then hand them the BAM and boom! a cube is born.
      
      This is the way *it MAY* be pitched - but my experience is that it's a Techo that does it - with the business person looking over the shoulder.)
      
      e.g. Order Total, Order Time Taken, Order Average Fulfillment Time, Order Destination.
      
   2. We can populate these cubes (& their values) from WF Workflows, custom .NET code, Business Rules, BizTalk and WCF Services.
      
      That friends is the missing piece to the puzzle. So as your system is crunching away, business intelligence is obtained from the working system in the context that you specify (a fancy way of saying - your business values).
      
      The capture of this information is done through BAM Interceptors (different flavours depending on if it's a Biztalk process, WF Workflow, WCF Service, Buffered, Direct...)
      
      The cool thing is that BAM databases can be aggregated etc. So we may have a business process running in Perth and a similiar in Syd with the end result being viewed in Melb.
      
      All in all - we're in a cube. All the existing BI tools can hook into the Cube as per normal.
      
   3. How can I interpret and work with my cubes? I've heard MOSS has 'dashboards' and other things that may help me......
      
      ENTER THE DRAGON......no I meant to say "Performance Point" (what a great movie that was!)
      
      Perf. Point is driven out of MOSS (perfect for the whole sharing/caring/collab world that Sharepoint pushes - alerts/presence info etc etc)
      
      It provides intelligence and the ability to forecast/plan/manipulate information from many different sources of which BAM is one. Perfect - you're very own rockect scientist on call.
      
      You business processes is just another area that plugs into this :)
      
   4. Tying it all together in a nutshell.....
      systems - more integration code, less custom code/app silos -> complex solutions comprising of many components -> how to intelligently track/monitor -> BAM -> BAM -> Cube(s), easy, distributable -> Perf Point, MOSS based very easy
      
      If I was a partner and wondering what technology to get into right now.....apart from BizTalk R2 :)..... gotta be Perf. Point -> 18 months time, you won't have enough perf. point people! :)
      
      Enjoy your Friday folks!