Moving from SM36/37 to an external job scheduler

Recently I'm pre-occupied by using external job schedulers to control SAP batch jobs in a IT landscape with multiple SAP systems.

My current thoughts turn to security between business functions and to a new way of managing jobs.

First Security - by introducing a central point of control you also introduce a new aspect to Security. If all your jobs are controlled from a central system then you need to be able to group and secure them so that you comply with industry rules for segregation of roles. In many tools this is possible but it can get complicated - keeping an eye on how to architect this for best fine-control and trying to keep as much logical simplicity implicit in the design is a real thinker...... Have you come across the same?

Secondly job management.... with integration with SAP Solution Manager you can start using "Job Documentation" in SolMan - this is a great way to control job management, but now you have the possibility of jobs starting in QA and being controlled in promotion through to Production. This is a massive paradigm shift from the old ways, where unless you built a method for control externally, essentially many people just manage jobs independantly in every system. Is this new overhead entirely worthwhile? Is the cost of administration worth the reduced cost in identifiying the nature of a job? In the end it probably is in most medium to large businesses, but it's something that's hard to quantify.


Expect more ruminations in this areas.....