The AAI Life Cycle

The Automic Automation Intelligence (AAI) life cycle in your organization goes through several phases, starting from installation to a fully matured utilization of AAI in your organization. This topic gives you an overview of the full AAI life cycle, explains what happens in each phase and identifies the key people in each of those phases.

Having an overview of the full life cycle is helpful to the following people:

  • Anyone who is primarily responsible for any one of the stages
  • People who are responsible for the overall implementation of AAI
  • Anyone who is involved in resource allocation

The Four Phases

The following are the four phases of the AAI life cycle in an organization:

  1. The technical implementation

    • Starting point: Your management has chosen to implement AAI in your organization.  
    • End result: Fully functioning installations of AAI and all additional components and connectors, including email servers, various security protocols, and so on. However, there are no jobstreams defined or any other job data.
    • Responsible person: This work is done by technical administrators of various kinds, referred to as AAI Administrators.

  2. The business implementation

    • Starting point: The technical implementation is complete.
    • End result: Jobstreams, business areas, SLAs, alerts, dashboards, filters for dashboards and monitoring, and reports are defined for each user and user group according to their individual needs. Users are defined, trained and using AAI. Processes are identified to maintain, enhance and optimize AAI for the organization.
    • Responsible people: The key person here is the AAI business area coordinator, who is familiar with the organization, specifically the business needs of key members and every group in the organization that needs to know about the jobs running in the various schedulers. Other people involved during the implementation are:
      • Jobstream administrators, who define the jobstreams according to the guidelines from the business area coordinator
      • Daily operators, who test the initial jobstreams
      • Operations managers and key account managers, who contribute input and who test initial jobstreams, dashboards, and reports
      • The Broadcom field engineer, who works closely with the business area coordinator to determine requirements and define and then execute the project plan

  3. Daily operations

    • Starting point: The technical and business implementations are complete, training has been provided, AAI is live and ready for daily use.
    • End result: This is on-going and has no end result. Nevertheless, these activities do feed into the maintenance and continuous improvement stage.
    • Responsible people: When AAI is in daily use, many people interact with it. Among them are:
      • Daily operators, who monitor jobstreams and react to alerts, and observe trends and places for performance improvement
      • Operations managers and key account managers, who follow trends on dashboards and job history reports
      • The business area coordinator, who follows daily operations and trends in jobstream runs for further expansion of the AAI implementation, and who also keep an eye on changes within the organization or its external partners to be sure that AAI continues to serve them
      • The experts on the connected schedulers, who troubleshoot jobstream issues

  4. Maintenance and continuous improvement

    • Starting point: AAI is live and already in daily use.
    • End result: This is on-going and has no end result. However, this work continuously moves AAI into greater states of maturity.
    • Responsible people: Many people contribute to the on-going maintenance and improvement of the AAI implementation at your organization. The following table lists the main people involved (Who) and the activities each contributes to these efforts:


      Who


      Contributing Activities
      AAI administrators
      • Maintain the physical servers that AAI and its components are installed on
      • Install upgrades
      • Troubleshoot technical problems
      The business area coordinator
      • Continue to oversee the use of AAI in the various functional and business groups in the organization
      • Become an AAI power user who can lead initiatives to extract more utility out of AAI to continuously better serve the organization's needs
      • Remain a liaison between the various business and technical users of AAI within the organization
      • Keep up on new functions with newly released functions
      Jobstream administrators
      • Define the initial details of new jobstreams
      • Modify jobstream definitions when the underlying jobs change on the respective schedulers

        Analyze jobstream executions to identify ways to modify certain jobstreams to run more efficiently and predictably, and then revise the jobstream definitions or the underlying jobs on the related scheduler accordingly

      In-house developers

      • Provide scripts and REST APIs for batch processing of large-volume tasks

      • Create and maintain complex custom reports

      Operators
      • Identify trends they see on jobstreams
      • Identify optimization potentials on jobstreams
      Internal support staff
      • Solve daily problems
      Broadcom support staff
      • Troubleshoot complex problems
      • Provide insight about underutilized or overlooked features of AAI that can enhance your utilization of AAI
      • Follow up on requests for new functionality and bug fixes