With that in mind, here are eight essential capabilities to look for in your workflow orchestration platform:
Support heterogeneous workflows: Companies are rapidly moving to the cloud, and for the foreseeable future will have workflows across a highly complex mix of hybrid environments. For many, this will include supporting the mainframe and distributed systems across the data center and multiple private and/or public clouds. If your orchestration platform cannot handle the diversity of applications and underlying infrastructure, you will have a highly fragmented automation strategy with many silos of automation that require cumbersome custom integrations to handle cross-platform workflow dependencies.
Service level agreement (SLA) management: Business workflows, ranging from ML models predicting risk to financial close and payment settlements, all have completion SLAs that are sometimes governed by guidelines set by regulatory agencies. Your orchestration platform must be able to understand and notify you of task failures and delays in complex workflows, and it needs to be able to map issues to broader business impacts.
Error handling and notifications: When running in production, even the best-designed workflows will have failures and delays. It is vital that the right teams are notified so that lengthy war room discussions just to figure out who needs to work on a problem can be avoided. Your orchestration platform must automatically send notifications to the right teams at the right time.
Self-healing and remediation: When teams respond to job failures within business workflows, they take corrective action, such as restarting a job, deleting a file, or flushing a cache or temp table. Your orchestration platform should enable automation engineers to configure such actions to happen automatically the next time the same problem occurs.
End-to-end visibility: Workflows execute interconnected business processes across hybrid tech stacks. Your orchestration platform should be able to clearly show the lineage of your workflows. This is integral to helping you understand the relationships between applications and the business processes they support. This is also important for change management. When making changes, it is vital to see what happens upstream and downstream from a process.
Self-service user experience (UX) for multiple personas: Workflow orchestration is a team sport with many stakeholders such as data teams, developers, operations, business process owners, and more. Each team has different use cases and preferences for how they want to interact with the orchestration tools. This means your orchestration platform must offer the right user interface (UI) and UX for each team so they can benefit from the technology.
Production standards: Running workflows in production requires adherence to standards, which means using correct naming conventions, error-handling patterns, etc. Your orchestration platform should have a mechanism that provides a very simple way to define such standards and guide users to the appropriate standards when they are building workflows.
Support DevOps practices: As companies adopt DevOps practices such as continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, the workflow development, modification, and even infrastructure deployment of workflows, your orchestration platform should be able to fit into modern release practices.
Control-M and BMC Helix Control-M DataOps tools and methodologies can help you make the best use of your data investment. But if you want to succeed in your DataOps journey, you must be able to operationalize the data. Control-M (self-hosted) and Helix Control-M (SaaS) provide a layer of abstraction to simplify the orchestration of complex data pipelines. These application and data workflow orchestration platforms enable end-to-end visibility and predictive SLAs across any data technology or infrastructure.
To read the entire article: https://www.bmc.com/blogs/unlock-data-initiatives-with-dataops/
For more information on BMC, please contact Cindy Weltzin at cindy_weltzin@bmc.com
