The concept of BAM revolved around the notion that data could be gathered at critical points and information produced that could give businesses the ability to make better decisions on a near-real-time basis. This next-generation BAM initiative, called process-driven business intelligence (BI), begins with a simple design notion: decision-making is a fundamental aspect of any operational business process. As such, decision-making capabilities and analytics should be embedded into the design of a process, not added after-the-fact or in reaction to processes that do not work efficiently. With this type of intelligent process design, the need for decision-making is anticipated as an integral part of each process, resulting in business processes that work smarter, not harder, in improving business efficiency and performance.