Getting your batch up to scratch

Smith: Workload automation can assist in batch processing.

We believe that half of application processing is done by batch. Often these processes have been happening for years and are not well documented. The person who set up or designed the process may have left the company.

Yet improving its mechanisms can lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and boost RoI.

Most IT staff consider batch processing for processes on regular job schedules. Enter workload automation, the descendant of traditional job schedulers, which embraces newer concepts such as object orientation, dynamic event processing, and service orientation.

Organisations therefore automate even more jobs and processes. For example, workload automation can control a business process that involves application jobs from multiple applications mixed with BPEL processing.

Or workload automation can be used alongside service-oriented architecture (SOA) for business processing and combine dynamic control of virtualised environments with ongoing business processing.

Often the batch processing function is not centralised. Effort is wasted managing processing for various applications across multiple operating systems.

Large-scale applications and operating systems have their own schedulers that require expertise and effort to manage.

This leaves organisations without a single viewpoint to monitor and manage processing across their various operating systems, physical and virtual servers, and applications.

Why not consolidate it all with a single workload automation product or architecture that is tightly integrated into the enterprise applications?

Integration between a workload automation tool and applications is more than just the ability of the tool to execute application jobs. To best integrate with applications, your workload automation product needs various capabilities.

Manual processes are slow, error-prone and can sabotage compliance efforts. Eliminate them with automation. Even processes that may fall under a ‘workflow’ designation may be targeted.

Why not poll end users on their most hated processes, and target them?

Workload automation lets each step of the manual process be transformed into a ‘job’ that can be knitted into a unified, automated business process.

A workload automation tool must pay attention to all events that occur within the organisation.

The ability to react to things that happen helps with the automation of manual processes because the same things users might look for to determine if or when they should manually perform a process can be detected.

The same cues can be used by the workload automation tool to automate the same process. Detection of events this way may be quicker and more accurate than a human.

Events expand the scope of automation beyond the ‘scheduling’ time-based mindset.
A centralised workload automation tool can detect and take advantage of events across various different servers and applications to drive and control automated processing.

Events, therefore, can become a kind of glue for disparate, previously thought-of-as-unconnected processes.

Batch processing has been neglected by IT managers and business efficiencies of automation have been overlooked. With the recession cutting budgets, getting the most of IT systems is even more important.

Alan Smith is a senior vice president for UK & Ireland at UC4