Supporting a diverse range of business users who make hundreds of thousands of database inquiries daily, and access data from hundreds of interconnected applications, could make life miserable for the teams responsible for maintaining data integrity and making sure core business systems are always available and running on time. Not at BMC. It has made us a better company. Thousands of our employees now use self-service data access and analytics to some degree, and 71% say it has made them more productive. This blog describes how we’ve achieved large-scale self-service analytics and how it helps our teams. Our people provided the vision, and Control-M gave us the means to put the vision into practice.
The tremendous growth in data access and consumption by business users is occurring as our systems are becoming more complex. Yet accessing and processing data in new ways to support individual needs is becoming easier. We did it by providing a flexible, user-friendly framework that encourages citizen development.
BMC has an ongoing data democratization program to give business teams the ability to access data and work with it in new ways to support their individual needs. The teams responsible for supporting our IT systems were the first to take advantage of expanded access and self-service. Since then, citizen development has spread to line-of-business users. In previous blogs, we’ve explained how we leveraged Control-M (self-hosted and SaaS) to introduce data democratization and showed how some early adopters took advantage to bring improvements to finance, customer support, marketing, sales operations, and information systems support. Self-service analytics and other forms of data democratization now touch two out of every three BMC employees worldwide.
Our team of business users is a good example of how this arrangement benefits all. We are data specialists, but not IT specialists, and our work depends on access to the data inside BMC’s comprehensive Snowflake data platform. That data is the product of hundreds of BMC’s other software applications, database formats, cloud environments, ETL operations, and data streams. Because of Control-M we don’t need to know all these products and their complementary tools. It gives us the interface to work with data from multiple systems without having to ask IT to provide access to each source. Before self-service, we had to ask the IT department for help, and wait in the proverbial line along with our colleagues in customer service, HR, finance, R&D, and every other function that needed help with data, software, and integrations.
Not anymore. Control-M gives our team (and other business users throughout BMC) role-based access to all the company’s data streams and an intuitive interface to build workflows that turn that data into new business intelligence. Control-M automatically enforces policies and access controls and orchestrates business-critical processes securely on the back end. Business users are free to create their products and processes, but in doing so they do not create their own versions of the core data. Through Control-M we’ve expanded access to data without increasing risk to uptime or data security. It’s been great for IT because they are freed up to focus on innovative projects too.
Control-M is well known for its ability to connect with multiple applications and environments, but its out-of-the-box Snowflake integration is still notable. Our team is doing more with the data and powerful features available through Snowflake because Control-M manages the complex dependencies within the platform and the others it connects with. We can connect to any Snowflake endpoint, create tables in a specified database and schema and populate them with a query, start or pause Snowpipes, and introduce all of Control-M’s scheduling and dependency features into Snowflake, all while monitoring these complex operations like any other job.
That’s not to say everything works perfectly the first time. Debugging is still required but the process is faster and completely different now that we use Control-M. Before, workflows that ran fine during testing didn’t always work right in production and it took a lot of phone calls, emails, and support tickets to find out why. That doesn’t happen now because Control-M lets us take a Jobs-as-Code approach so proper scheduling and execution are built directly into the workflow. Potential problems are discovered and flagged before jobs go into production. Then our business users simply click to drill down into the workflow and identify any issues with it or its dependent jobs. We see exactly where to debug the workflow and can usually resolve the issue without raising a support ticket. This functionality has saved us (and IT Ops) a lot of time, which means BMC is delivering innovations faster.
Delivering a 360-degree customer view
Customers ultimately benefit from our ability to scale innovation because we’re more proactive and responsive in addressing their challenges and needs. Our Customer360 dashboard is a great example. It provides a comprehensive view of a customer in a single pane of glass by organizing input from Salesforce, Jira, Qualtrics, Eloqua, Gainsight, Adobe, and over 40 different sources in all. Inputs include the customer’s open support cases, activity predictions generated by AI and machine learning, account and subscription status, downloads, marketing engagements, telemetry data on product usage, CRM metrics, and even intent data from second- and third-party sources. Many of the data and metrics presented come from sources that had never been combined before and were developed by business users who had new ideas.
“It is great to be able to use Control-M to match the customer outcome from a support request to the internal details of how we operate at BMC to ensure a customer is getting the most out of its investment in our products,” says Pam Dickerman, a BMC program manager who uses the portal. Within Customer360, she found details of how a customer’s support request led to an innovation by BMC that saved the customer more than $250,000. BMC then shared the learnings throughout the company to help other customers. “It is a full circle, because Control-M helps make Customer360 so useful for us at BMC, and that leads to such amazing results for our customers.”
Customer360 has enabled us to go from being reactive to proactive in meeting customers’ individual needs; 76% of the more than 2,000 people who use the dashboard say it has improved their understanding of customers. That’s had a powerful effect on BMC because the dashboard is available to all customer-facing teams. Notably, no one is required to use Customer360 to do their jobs – the fact that more than 2,000 people use it by choice is great a testimony to its value. We consistently measure user satisfaction with the tool, and it’s earned a world-class 50 Net Promoter Score (NPS). Users credit the dashboard for providing recurring time savings that our calculations show are significant.
User satisfaction with Customer360 and the improved customer understanding and responsiveness it produce show the real-world benefits of making citizen development available across an organization. The way the dashboard was built and how it functions show the power of Control-M.
As noted, the single-screen dashboard shows information that was created by accessing and blending input from over 40 sources, including our enterprise data warehouse, departmental databases, in-house servers, cloud-hosted applications, and more. Bringing these and other sources into a single environment has been seamless because Control-M has hundreds of out-of-the-box integrations – after years of developing BI and analytics solutions and creating thousands of workflows, we haven’t found an environment that we couldn’t connect to yet. When BMC invests in new software, these integrations shorten the time to value.
Control-M also brings our entire data team together. Data architects, data engineers, BI analysts, MLOps engineers, and data scientists all work with Control-M while continuing to use their favorite and job-specific tools. Control-M provides a common platform, enforces role-based access, orchestrates activity, and prevents workflow conflicts so users can focus on creating, not integrating and managing.
Time savings have been a clear and documented benefit of using Control-M as our single platform to support workflow development and orchestration. An even greater benefit, which we can’t measure, is the trust Control-M has created in our data and processes. Without this platform, there is simply no way IT would be able to give users the keys to enterprise data and say, ‘Have at it!’ Having Control-M as a platform is a key enabler for BMC’s data science and engineering teams to do what we do because it lets us focus on innovation.
In the very near future Control-M will be helping BMC business users take advantage of self service to innovate with AI. BMC recently introduced Jett, our first generative AI (GenAI) advisor for Control-M SaaS. Jett lets users interact with Control-M SaaS simply by speaking in their natural language. That will make it easier for us to continually optimize and troubleshoot our workflows.
What excites us most is what’s coming next. GenAI is changing the game. From conversational data experiences powered by NLP to intelligent agents that push insights where they matter most, the data and analytics landscape is evolving rapidly. Orchestration will be more important than ever in this next chapter, not just to keep up, but to lead. With a strong foundation in Control-M SaaS in our data ecosystem, we’re ready to take on what’s next.
