Ties business service management and workload automation together
In a first-of-its-kind offering, BMC last week [jan24] introduced a self-service interface to a workload automation tool – its popular Control-M – for business users.
In a first-of-its-kind offering, BMC last week introduced a self-service interface to a workload automation tool — its popular Control-M — for business users.
With the Web-based Control-M Self Service tool in hand, business users no longer need to bother IT with requests such as, “What’s the status of my processing job?” or, “I want to run this workload, can you help?” Instead, the users simply open the Control-M Self Service interface to check on job status, make processing changes — per policy — and initiate predefined workloads from a service catalog.
ONE FIRM’S EXPERIENCE: Self-service IT at your command
“We’re allowing companies to get rid of the simple state-and-status questions, the trivial work, that take up their service desks’ space and time and instead run more efficiently and focus on the hard problems,” says Robin Reddick, a director of solutions marketing at BMC.
It’s what you might call a merging of business service management and workload automation, adds Brian Johnson, senior product marketing manager at the company.
“If you will, we’re empowering IT to help the business group accomplish the mission of the company. This takes IT out of the techie realm and helps it better align with business goals,” he says.
Control-M Self Service has interesting potential for a variety of workloads at ConAgra Foods, a longtime Control-M user, says John Murphy, IT manager at this Omaha, Neb., packaged food giant. As one example, he points out the possibility of letting workers in plant locations initiate day- or month-end processing jobs.
“This is where the opportunities are, where we don’t know exactly when we want a job to run but we know there’s some event that occurs and then at that point we know we want the jobs to run. Instead of needing those users to call into our operations center to get those going, this would let us enable the users to go out to the Web front-end and execute the jobs themselves,” he explains.
The visuals provided with Control-M Self Service will help business users, as well, Murphy adds. “Right now end users don’t understand the linkages between different jobs. But if they can see a Visio-type layout that shows them Job One runs then initiates Job Two and then Job Three, that will help them better understand their jobs,” he says.
And that’s key to remember, Murphy adds. “These really are their jobs, and we just help configure and set them up, and ensure that they run.”
