Business Transaction Management

In a world of TLAs, it is always interesting when you come across a new one; in my case it was BTM (Business Transaction Management). For those of us concerned with the development and improvement of business processes, we already have the TLA BAM (Business Activity Monitoring or Management). So what if the difference between BTM and BAM I hear you say?

Wikipedia defines BTM as “an approach to managing IT from a business transaction perspective. BTM aims to guarantee service quality for users conducting business transactions while simultaneously optimizing the IT applications and infrastructure across which those transactions execute.” It requires the ability to capture and to track all transactions, across all IT tiers, automatically and continuously. The only problem with this definition is what is meant by the term “business transaction”?

Recently I had a briefing with Russell Rothstein, VP Product Marketing of OpTier and he explained that a business process, triggered by a business event, is made up of one or more business transactions. He went on to expand that, in today’s complex business world, where parts of the business can be outsourced to partners, there was a real need to be able to monitor from the beginning to the end with all points in between.