It’s Payback Time – Eliminate Technical Debt from Legacy Scheduling and Workload Automation Tools

By Neil Kinson, Chief of Staff, Redwood Software

It’s Payback Time – Eliminate technical debt from legacy scheduling and workload automation tools

Moving to more agile and modern scheduling and workload automation (WLA) supports your goals now and into the future. It’s clear that organizations that have made the move are happy they’ve made the switch, too.

Many IT teams are pleased to discuss how much more efficient they’ve become after upgrading their automation technology. Now they can focus on growth, development and competitive advantage. Business stakeholders get the information and customer experiences they need. The story always has a happy ending.

So, how did they get there?

What about that first step, when an organization gets what may be its first a clear view of the initial state of the enterprise WLA environment? What about the second step, when they work to simplify with new tools? Isn’t this a painful process?

The answer is no.

That’s because the removal of technical debt from old scheduling tools isn’t a process of adding complexity, steps or manual work. It’s all about simplifying, eliminating risk and managing better. It’s about proactively removing heavy technical debt that’s accumulated from working around limited scheduling tools.

What is Technical Debt?

Technical debt is a term that originated in software development. People would create applications using solid, well-designed code. Then, short deadlines pop up. Requirements change. Quick, not-so-solid fixes start to become more attractive. They go around problems to get the desired results in a short period of time, with some added complexity, and acceptable (for now) flaws.

With scheduling and workload automation, technical debt is an accumulation of all the quick fix workarounds that build up as a result of keeping the status quo–using a mixed bag of legacy on-premises WLA tools.

Technical debt like this can add to actual debt, too, because it’s expensive. It can cost the manual effort and time of your best team members who get pulled away from innovation to make sure processes complete, infrastructure is running, and patches are made. It makes them firefighters.

It costs you again with licensing fees for the scheduling tools themselves as additional jobs are set up to work around calendar and new day limitations. It also increases costs for your datacenter by filling up space with oversized agents, unnecessary logs and repeated instances.

Turn on the Lights

Once a new, modern solution is in place, the situation can be improved almost immediately. It means that people can once again focus on what they’re supposed to do. Automated migration tools and proven processes make the move fast, simple and completely transparent.

Once processes are migrated, improved visualization capabilities in modern tools show process chains as they may never have been seen before. This literally turns the lights on to steps and processes that were created just to keep things running. It’s then just a matter of eliminating complexities by working with the enhanced capabilities of the new tool.

A new white paper, “Modernize to Digitize”, from industry analysts, EMA, describes “The Great WLA Migration” taking place. The document provides a blueprint for a successful passage to modern process automation for digital transformation.

It also explains that “SaaS WLA can deliver improved security, availability, and scalability. Let the experts on the software operate the core system for you and let your team focus on what is important to your operation”.

Redwood’s RunMyJobs® is the only SaaS solution for WLA and scheduling. It reduces costs as on-premises installations are switched off. It removes the need for customers to update and patch systems and eliminates risk from process downtime. Its flexible, agile automation capabilities eliminate the need for new day workarounds or the need to wrestle with large agents in the enterprise.

It’s payback time for bad technical debt from outdated schedulers. Find out how you can get the return on investment you deserve.

Get the new white paper from Enterprise Management Associates® (EMA™) now: Modernize to Digitize: Mitigate Risk and Future-Proof Operations.