One of the more frustrating things about job schedulers is that historically they've been pretty dumb pieces of software. Instead of inherently understanding the capabilities of the underlying IT environment, the average job scheduler was basically a script that directed a specific set of jobs to specific sets of resources.

But the compute resources in the underlying environment tend to be pretty dynamic. New resources get added and not all resources are being used to the same degree at any given time. CA this week is making the case that as part of an overall approach to managing system resources, known as Lean IT, it is high time that job schedulers got smart.

Version 11.1 of CA Workload Automation, formerly dSeries Workload Automation, makes it easier for IT administrators to not only schedule jobs across multiple platforms, but to also allow those jobs to invoke additional resources based on their availability and the priority level of the workload.

Any type of automation related to IT can be a touchy subject these days. IT staff people get worried that automation will eventually lead to a reduction in headcount. But the fact of the matter is that the process of IT has become far too labor-intensive. In order to get business customers to continue to invest in IT, we need a more efficient model for managing IT. That means instead of dedicating a lot of people to relatively low value chores, we need to be able to reassign those people to developing IT solutions that extend the business value of IT.

We live in challenging economic times. And even if the economy is actually starting to recover, it will take at least a couple of years to get back to any level of comparable historic economic growth. For IT people, that means that the pressure to be more efficient with IT is going to continue to be extreme for at least the next two years.

What all this means then is that IT organizations need a new generation of IT management tools that give them divine powers over every granular process within the domain of IT. Anything short of that just isn't going to cut it anymore.