Business processes are constantly plagued by challenges in the current environment. But in order for enterprises to cope, there is a need for more workload automation (WLA) tools. In recent years, only a few advances were made that it’s becoming evident today that new ones should be introduced.

When you talk of a business process in the context of workload, you are referring to the volume of activities a business can handle at a given period. Most of them are event-driven processes involving reportorial requests, work schedules, password changes, and configuration updates among others.

Usually, the processes are performed by humans which can be a handicap if the workload is overwhelming. Let’s use the process of email transmission as an example to stress this point.

If a help desk portal or a user sends an email to a point person or admin who is busy with something, the response time could take several minutes and even extend to a few hours. The time frame could even drag on in case the request is passed on to another personnel or different department that would respond to the initial query.

What is glaring in the example is that humans and e-mail servers are imperfect. Therefore there is a risk the email message might not be acted upon because it got lost in the process.

The only way to avoid or solve this kind of problem in the workplace is the adoption of self-service automation. You can eliminate human errors, clear the logjams, and pave the way for efficient workflows. Admins could set up a self-service portal and dictate the frequency of requests and nature of permissions accessible to user roles depending on hierarchy (i.e. managerial or general staff, accounting, and other departments).

In effect, self-service automation allows the end user to initiate a project instead of the administrator. Once the chances of bottlenecks are greatly diminished, you save time while freeing up the admin to do more strategic tasks.

Self-service automation improves productivity

A major northeastern utility company has been using the BMC Workload Automation’s self-service product for more than 20 years. The admins there are deeply familiar with WLA. One workload automation admin at the company, who requested anonymity, expressed elation by Control-M’s most recent update.

Self-service automation offers enormous benefits. First, it saves time as admins can write a single script for a process and easily monitor them. The WLA tool can also trigger dependent processes and systems to run whenever tasks are successfully completed.

The IT department doesn’t have to build a business process for an end user to own and manage. According to Naegle a Gartner Analyst, the end user can initiate tasks through an automated process. End users need not wait for IT to prioritize requests. More so, the admins can go about doing other work and not be disturbed to run a batch process or provide a report for the user.

For this utility company, the end users are the operations admins in different workgroups. With self-service automation in place, everybody continues to focus on their particular tasks without interruption. Operations pros gain access to server status reports without having to seek the help of server admins. A case in point is the read-only views into databases. Admins will no longer retrieve information to order.
What you have is operations automation more than business automation. But in essence, when you are automating a business service, you’re providing a service for the business that is necessary.

The market is becoming highly competitive. BMC’s automated self-service portal is available in the form of a web-based companion application.

End users prefer self-service automation because requests are acted upon quickly and do not disrupt IT work. The importance of BMC’s application may vary depending on customers and their specific needs.

The apprehension of giving end users who might not be tech-savvy more control is understandable. However, that anxiety can be quashed. BMC Control M enables admins to narrow the scope of jobs as well as operations. An end user can do the activation especially if the users are external vendors, organizations or processes.

A concern is in the event something goes wrong or a process is delayed that might prompt a dependent process. The question now is which of them will consequently break? You can use the BMC self-service to hold onto that job to prevent errors and resolving the issue is less time-consuming.

Everything is predefined, including the grant of access to users, to what data and the specific actions that be taken by any given job role or department. The admins are therefore spared from security nightmares.

The built-in procedure to handle any kind of process failure is a key benefit of the BMC Control-M Workload Automation solution. Any dumb script is powerless to do that. In short, if Job A succeeds, then the automation tool will trigger Job B. Inversely if Job A fails, the tool instantly triggers an alert to Information Management or a ticketing tool for timely examination.

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