Beyond Job Scheduling: the Road to Enterprise Process Automation

BEYOND JOB SCHEDULING: THE ROAD TO ENTERPRISE PROCESS AUTOMATION Introduction ..........................................................2 Job Scheduling Defined...........................................3 The Evolution of Job Scheduling ...............................3 UNIX CRONtab ......................................................3 Distributed Scheduling Products ...............................4 Distributed RDBMS-based Scheduling .......................4 Application API’s ....................................................5 Enterprise process automation .................................5 Dynamic, Data-Driven Automation ...........................5 Conditional Business Rules ......................................7 Workload Balancing................................................7 End-user involvement.............................................8 Fast Flexible Implementations..................................8 Accelerated Information Delivery..............................9 Java-Enabled Client.............................................. 10 Interactive Graphical Management ......................... 10 Security and Auditability ....................................... 10 Conclusion .......................................................... 10 Evaluation Matrix ................................................. 11 About UC4 Software ............................................. 12 Copyright © Year 2008 UC4 Software (UC4), All Rights Reserved. The contents of this document are copyrighted by UC4 unless otherwise indicated. All rights are reserved. Any forms of copying other than an individual user’s personal reference without express written permission is prohibited. Further distribution of these materials is strictly forbidden, including but not limited to, posting, e-mailing, faxing, archiving in a database, redistributing via computer network or in a printed form. 1 INTRODUCTION For example, accounting might be scheduled on a The relentless pace of today’s business environ- calendar year basis and the emphasis would be on ment and its enormous pressures on IT staff has months, quarters, and fiscal year end. Alterna- made it critical for corporate business systems to tively, manufacturing might place all of its become more responsive and reliable. End-user emphasis on weekly periods for purposes of plan- expectations for reliability and speed grow dra- ning, inventory analysis, and production. matically as more and more users have come in Manufacturing would also be forced to deal with contact with a wider array of software applica- plant shutdowns and holiday periods that impact tions. Expectations now approach that of the production cycles, but may have little relevance telephone, with users demanding business sys- for accounting purposes. tems to be available instantly and operate flawlessly. Today’s supercharged environment requires companies to respond much more swiftly to changing Coincident with these rising user expectations are business conditions. Referring to the discussion the increasing complications of enterprise comput- above, it might still be viable for a company’s fis- ing. IT personnel have been forced to come to cal operations to run on a fairly routine basis. grips with the accelerating rates of change, and However, the realities of increased global competi- the demands of corporations everywhere to tiveness dictate a manufacturer to be linked quickly respond to the competitive threats and electronically with its business partners in an ex- opportunities brought about by e-business. tended “just in time” enterprise. To exploit the extended enterprise, the manufacturer must re- The rise of the web has proven to be the ultimate place or automate its manufacturing, ordering and nemesis for the so-called “batch window” - that inventory processing systems to respond dynami- nightly opportunity to run large groups of transac- cally to changing business requirements and tions offline. Instead we have seen the rise of the competitive pressures. “real-time organization” that needs to respond to changing business conditions quickly and effort- Improving business responsiveness through lessly in a 24 / 7 fashion. This creates significant automation requires a comprehensive approach challenges for corporations as they try to respond build in from the start. The selected solution must to the demands of near real-time processing with automate processing across a wide spectrum of their traditional batch-oriented back end systems. software, computing platforms, and business processes. Implementing a solution that moves In traditional enterprise computing, the availability beyond mere scheduling and fulfills the promise of of the batch window meant that a significant pe- enterprise process automation can mean the dif- riod of time could be set aside to launch, monitor ference between corporate success and failure. and manage a variety of batch/sequential activi- Traditional batch job scheduling products cannot ties that were necessary for the proper running of meet today’s enterprise automation needs, lead- the business. The new global business environ- ing to the creation of a new breed of software to ment, and in particular the Internet with its handle this increasingly complex and demanding implied on-line, real-time, 24x7 operation has role. dramatically altered this rigid notion of scheduling. The idea of having batch processes with a multi- Implied in this accelerated business climate is the tude of similar transactions that are processed at requirement that IT staffs must build computing night is still relevant in many cases, but there are infrastructures that create responsive platforms many other examples where traditional time- for change. Job scheduling tools with their rigid based, operations centric ‘scheduling” is wholly adherence to the limitations of automating tasks inadequate. Instead, companies require near or based on day, date and time don't meet this re- real-time processing. quirement. New solutions are required that can automate and accelerate existing business proc- Traditional batch scheduling held that business esses and adapt to new processes and systems as processes could be mapped out and executed in they arise. predictable ways that followed one or more business calendars. The dominant concept was that This white paper demonstrates the ever-increasing certain business activities and the software sys- value of adding enterprise process automation tems that supported those activities operated in software to the IT infrastructure. It traces the sequential, predictable ways. Scheduling tools evolution of traditional batch scheduling, illus- were only required to support notions of day, trates where leading edge products are today, and date, time and multiple business calendars to outlines a set of requirements for moving beyond support corporate and/or departmental needs. batch processing and into the realm of true enterprise process automation. The paper concludes by 2 illustrating how UC4 Workload Automation Suite and shortcomings of various approaches. In the addresses these advanced product requirements. following section, we outline the additional requirements necessary for moving beyond job JOB SCHEDULING DEFINED scheduling and into the realm of true enterprise At the most basic, job scheduling is the orderly, process automation. reliable sequencing of batch program execution. To handle these duties properly, a modern job When beginning to manage batch workload, most scheduler provides a host of features that allow it firms inevitably launch their jobs manually. This is to schedule distributed workload efficiently and in understandable and even appropriate, but it is a manner consistent with the operational goals of also easy to see how quickly this approach breaks the business. down as the number of machines, jobs, and scheduling dependencies increase. For instance, all businesses rely on one or more business calendars. Calendars govern such things Most operating systems provide a command line as when payroll is run, when corporate reports are interface for launching tasks in a manual fashion. generated, and when fiscal months and quarters As an example, UNIX provides the BATCH and AT are closed. The key issues with calendars and commands that allow users to launch background other important scheduling features are flexibility tasks immediately (BATCH) or AT a specific time. and reliability: Can the scheduler adapt to the These commands represent the “bare bones” of changing needs of the business, and deliver pre- scheduling and are in no way adequate for com- dictable results time after time? plex scheduling requirements. Additionally, programs and applications need to Surprisingly, many modern enterprise applications run on a variety of platforms, at specified times, in still require a great deal of manual intervention. specified orders, and with varying levels of re- Often a required business process will span sev- source demands and prioritization. Schedulers eral batch processes with each batch process need to be flexible enough to accommodate these being preceded by a manual process to set up new varying technology, business and resource de- batch runs, review program output, gather addi- mands. If the job scheduler is able to sequence tional input data, initiate subsequent processes, processes and manage resource contentions, ap- etc. Standard scheduling tools cannot automate plications will execute faster and more predictably, many of these processes due to inherit

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