EMA Blog: Business Intelligence and IT Management

There is a reason orchestras have a single conductor. Can you imagine the cacophony that would result if a horn section performed out of sync with a string section? Or if the percussions played a faster beat then the woodwinds?  But in IT management, it’s all too common for organizations to have separate automation platforms conducting individual software elements. In fact, this is often the cause of an increased IT complexity that results in degraded performance and reliability. For instance, SAP’s popular customer relationship management (CRM) software includes a built-in job scheduler – the Computing Center Management System (CCMS) – with some limited capabilities specifically designed to support its unique platform (such as to analyze and distribute client workloads). But this is an independent tool requiring administration and monitoring tasks separate from any other automated solutions. An average IT organization will need to manage dozens of similar management platforms, each with its own unique interface and operating parameters.

Chances are, in an average day, you are not accomplishing as many tasks as you would like … and neither are your colleagues or your employees. What is mystifying about that statement is that it seems today’s workforce is putting in more hours and more effort than ever before coinciding with an increased adoption of IT devices and applications designed to improve user productivity. In fact, this has been a key driver for organizations to enable workforce mobility – to provide flexibility in accessing business IT resources (applications, data, email, and other services) from any device at any location at any time in order to improve overall business performance. But even the most accomplished business professionals must admit there are days when little gets done despite herculean efforts.

In a perfect world, all business processes would be automated and all work tasks would be accomplished with the click of a button. This idyllic work experience seems to be the realization of Plato’s utopia…or, if you prefer, the world of the Jetsons. Regrettably, however, we clearly do not live in a perfect world. Put simply, while any repeatable process can be automated, not every process is repeatable, so automation is not a practical solution in all cases. This is particularly a problem for enterprises since business productivity is almost entirely dependent on the rapid and accurate performance of business processes.

During this year’s research for the 2012 EMA Workload Automation (WLA) Radar Report, we encountered a number of very interesting core findings. These research results mostly originated from dozens of conversations with end customers, who have been using WLA software for many years and sometimes even for decades. WLA, by definition, is a mature discipline, as it started during the beginning of mainframe times, then became more complex when organizations adopted distributed computing, and today is faced with a new challenge: the cloud. Please take a look at what our research showed as the most important aspects of a modern WLA solution. The following vendors were included in the report: Arcana, ASCI, ASG, BMC, CA Technologies, Cisco, Flux, MVP Systems, Network Automation, ORSYP, Stonebranch, UC4.