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, 24×7x365. 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.