Here is a software innovation that is
potentially transformational. I
have long been interested in providing support to knowledge intense business
processes. This was my first exposure to what became knowledge management in
the early 90s and the concept behind many useful enterprise 2.0
implementations. Now OpenSpan is going beyond mashups to provide quick to
create interconnections between applications to automate many aspects of
business processes. As a result users have more time to focus on the decisions
within these processes. These
automations can also create substantial time savings to drive significant ROI.
I recently spoke with Rick Marquardt and
Francis Carden of OpenSpan about their offering. OpenSpan's User Process
Management software provides an intuitive visual design environment for
automating user processes within and across applications without requiring APIs
or changes to the application's code. They have figured out a way to get inside
the application even if it does not contain an API for this task. Developers
have the ability to integrate Windows, cloud/SaaS and custom legacy
applications, which enables organizations to improve user efficiency while
extending the ROI of existing applications.
With OpenSpan organizations can go inside any
application a user accesses, monitor user interactions to understand how power
users operate and then automate processes to streamline these actions. Building these automations
to connect applications is a drag and drop process as Rick and Francis
demonstrated to me. Below you can see an example of making connections between
a CRM application and an Order Entry system. This can eliminate the current out
dated practice of cut and paste between apps to automate fill-ins.
Open Span can also monitor user activity to
help determine which processes to automate and what applications to connect. In
addition to reducing steps, this can also reduce the number of windows on a
user’s desktop. Using the OpenSpan Events desktop monitoring
technology, you can record every step in every user’s workflow, 24x7x365. It is
no longer necessary to conduct sample time and motion studies or view screen
recordings to try and guess what's happening. You can get the user’s detailed desktop
interactions in real time for accurate monitoring. This can both help target
where to automate and then track the ROI from these efforts. I have been
involved in a number of call center monitoring efforts so I have first hand
appreciation of the value of this capability. Below is a sample screen.
OpenSpan is now offering a free download of
their IDE, OpenSpan Studio or the Plug-In for Visual Studio. Built on an
embedded version of the Microsoft Visual Studio Framework, the plug-in can be
used with Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and makes OpenSpan functionality
available for the first time via a .NET API. This means that developers can now
access all of OpenSpan's runtime capabilities directly from code and mix and
match .NET and OpenSpan projects in a single executable. OpenSpan has decided
to make the tools available free and focus their commercial fees on providing
the run time to support automations the developers create. I think this is a
smart move. It reduces any financial risk until a solution is created that
demonstrates value.
To further support developers OpenSpan has
created the OpenSpan Developer Community. It offers extensive resources, including a code gallery, knowledge base
and forum for collaborating with other developers. This is another smart move
as the objective is to empower developers with increased capability to create
applications that use the OpenSpan runtime. The OpenSpan Developer Community is
seen below.
I asked how this goes beyond mashups as they
have a similar objective. Mashups generally only draw data from multiple sources.
While this is certainly an improvement in application development, OpenSpan
also can perform transactions within these applications by getting completely
inside the applications. This can even work with third party applications. I
watched OpenSpan connect a FedEx tracking system with an internal order
processing application with only the requirement of gaining user access to the
FedEx Web app, not developer access. Rick said that their clients have seen
dramatic improvements in business process execution. I can believe this. As I
said at the beginning this could be transformational.
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