Job Scheduling has always been a vital component of the IT infrastructure. Historically referred to as 'batch processing', job scheduling is also referred to as 'background processing' and, more recently, 'business process automation' and 'IT workload automation'.

The fundamental concept of a job scheduling solution, or job scheduler, is that it automates the management and control of IT tasks (jobs) that perform a specific piece of work. Business processes managed by a job scheduling solution are many and various. Typical examples include payroll, invoicing, updating account information, financial period-end close, and inventory updates. In fact submission of the underlying IT tasks for any business process can usually improved by a job scheduler.

Traditional background workload  automation, or job scheduling, has been the backbone for IT operations for many years and is still very much a part of the IT landscape. With 24/7 global enterprises we now see the 'batch window', within which job schedulers must perform their tasks, substantially reduced or replaced altogether by near real-time processing. Job scheduling solutions need to adapt to these changes and manage increasingly complex workload. 

The challenge for the IT organization is to somehow adapt to the increasing demand for information now from both internal and external influences, maintain the stability of existing established business processes and optimize resource and information utilization.  This has led to the need for real-time job schedulers, and the development of event driven job scheduling solutions such as Cronacle, which was designed specifically to address these needs.

The Benefits of Event-Driven Job Scheduling

More and more emphasis is being placed on timely and accurate response to events for the execution of business processes. The number and nature of events varies enormously and they can occur at any time of any day or night, such is the un-predictable nature of the modern commercial environment. The event driven job scheduler will use these events to manage and control when and where workload submitted. The action taken in response to an event can become an event in itself and trigger a subsequent chain of processes and scheduled jobs. Business processes are driven by these events with the actions taken entirely dependent on what the events are, when they occur and where they originated. The events themselves will be many and various, some of the more common examples being:

• On-line requests for information and/or web services.
• Inter company or department information exchange (through EDI): As part of inter-departmental or extended Supply Chain interaction
• Completion of a specific set of tasks that will result in subsequent processing, based entirely on the (unpredictable) outcome of the original tasks.
• Ad Hoc end-user demands
• Order-to-cash processes
• Sarbanes-Oxley compliance processes
• Invoicing & billing
• Consumer and B2B product replenishment
• Metering & RFID  

Modern business processes and the job scheduling they require cannot be accurately predicted. Because of this the traditional batch based ‘straight through job processing’ approach does not always work. Furthermore it is not always practical to schedule business activities around the demands of background processing without one impacting on the performance or availability of the other. The real-time enterprise is about providing the means for addressing these issues whilst meeting overall business objectives. Using events to trigger job scheduling is one way of managing these issues that will enable:

• Improved business responsiveness to external events.
• The ability to perform processes based on up to the minute information.
• A framework for integrating multiple business processes without the need for radical changes to applications.
• Increased capability to respond to change.
• Better management of job scheduling dependencies.

Of course it is not simply a case of implementing a means for reacting to business events in a given way. It is necessary to not only manage reaction to these events, but to also manage the integration of the event-driven process with the job scheduler. Managing the two together ensures that end-to-end critical system performance is not compromised. Particularly as organizations embrace enterprise software applications to help better manage their businesses it becomes clear that traditional job scheduling and event-driven job scheduling must be integrated to minimize performance issues and customer response times. This so called ‘business process fusion’, will often involve multiple applications such as SAP, Oracle and PeopleSoft and will usually span many operating system environments including mainframe, UNIX, Linux and Windows. These interdependencies must also be managed leading to an architecture based on the delivery of service levels that are acceptable to the user or customer. The event driven job scheduler takes the business in this direction.