Operations Automation moves at the Speed of Visibility

When it comes to meeting goals for operational efficiency and effectiveness, what comes to mind? For many, the next few years are expected to bring significant change with new technologies that transform how teams and services work—and the challenge of keeping up with all of them.

While automation has long been hailed as the answer to many operational challenges, it will also drive a need for more operations specialists to handle work that can’t be automated or requires a hands-on approach. This will create a need for access to more actionable, real-time, dynamic data in the fastest, easiest manner possible. To sum it up, it will require reducing the number of steps to achieve visibility, correlation, and execution.

In the mainframe world, the decades-long manner of performing administration has been the 3270 “green screen.” For veteran mainframers, it remains a go-to tool and there are still several valid uses for it. However, using it along with a collection of monitors and interfaces poses a problem. First, it works as a reactive approach to service alerts. Or to put it another way, it is a bit like calling firefighters after the house is on fire. You’re trying to minimize damage after the fact versus preventing it from happening.

Secondly, the use of multiple tools for an investigation or remediation inevitably means more manual workflows and increased response times. Finally, as the user experience (UX) with IT tools continues to standardize and simplify with web-based, customizable graphical views of data, new mainframers expect a similar experience.

Because a graphical user interface (GUI) is table stakes, we at BMC have focused on how we could simplify workflows and bring insightful data to the surface rapidly with a solution that’s easy for mainframe operations teams to use and still delivers value to veteran mainframe administrators. The result is a truly centralized view of all systems and subsystems, the removal of several manual steps, and a faster path to preventing a service issue.

Our latest BMC AMI Ops release goes one step further, delivering a seamless experience across operations management and predictive analytics capabilities, giving users one place to perform daily management, see a potential service impact hours or days before it happens, and then take action with guided responses. That means veteran mainframers no longer have to pivot across several interfaces and can now get a complete end-to-end workflow in one tool. And mainframers who are newer to the platform get a familiar, intuitive tool with baked-in intelligence to get to a service issue faster and easier. No matter who you are, it means more time, efficient services, and insights to transform your business faster. Everybody wins.

To find out how you can deliver a solution that delivers the best of both worlds to established and new mainframers, learn more here.

These postings are my own and do not necessarily represent BMC's position, strategies, or opinion.

See an error or have a suggestion? Please let us know by emailing blogs@bmc.com.