Let workflows run independent of receiving files

with more companies, losing access to the command line and crontab, what if a workflow which could basically be a wrapper for an external program can run without receiving any files and can be scheduled to run from a selector-like object. Let's say you have a program that does something and you want it to run every day at a certain time, you just create a workflow that has a run external program in it. and then have a selector-like object just run the workflow without any input files. the external program itself would need to be self contained ( the maintenance script is a good candidate for this), so you basically replace crontab with selectors.