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Contact Centers lead Desktop Automation drive

Francis Carden — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 20:17:00 +0000

OpenSpan is the worlds leading provider of Desktop Automationsoftware. Primarily and originally built for innovative contact centers who seek to improve agent performance, OpenSpan today is now leading the charge in back office desktop automation as well.There are a few other players in this space and we think they just play at automation anyway. In fact, I look forward to the day when we could all be on a panel and pitch our technologies against one and other. Head to head. Now there’s a challenge I’m laying down! For now, I’ll take the 100′s of OpenSpan wins as a credit to those real head to head situations :)You see, where other companies claim to do desktop automation, OpenSpan really does do it. Our technology runs inside the applications that actually run on the desktop and can automate virtually anything a user can do with the application. OpenSpan can monitor (Desktop Analytics) and control (Desktop Automation) applications without source code and no change to any business logic. And, it can all be done from a single visual desktop designer! The competitors will have you believe this is what they do as well. However, what they actually do, is sit on top of the applications, and only the simple ones at that, and try to determine whats going on. Not by getting inside them as OpenSpan does but by effectively screen scraping. This limits what they can do, to simple field to field copy with little to no full blown robust automation.

In fact, the OpenSpan technology is so powerful in the way it interacts with your live applications, it can, in real-time, control that application’s user interface (UI) in the same way the originally programmer of that application could! Securely and robustly. In effect, not only can OpenSpan determine what tasks a user is doing, we can automate the entire process as well.

So, when you have decided that the huge reduction in call times and task times is something your company needs, take a look at the competitors first. It won’t take long and we’ll show you why, when we do go head to head with these companies, OpenSpan’s technology is superior and more advanced for many many reasons.

Cheers,

Francis

Google Analytics v Desktop Analytics

Francis Carden — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 20:49:00 +0000

Google Analytics is not new to most people but desktop analytics probably is. So what’s the difference? If I were to try and use the least words (hard for me) to summarize the difference it would go like this;

“Google Analytics monitors visitor activity of enterprise web sites across the internet” whereas “Desktop Analytics monitors enterprise users activty of any application (web, windows, java, mainframe etc.,) on any enterprise desktop anywhere in the network”

Google defines it as;

Google Analytics shows you how people found your site, how they explored it, and how you can enhance their visitor experience. With this information, you can improve your website return on investment, increase conversions, and make more money on the web.

OpenSpan defines it as;

OpenSpan Desktop Analytics™ captures user activity at the desktop to reveal how users interact with their desktop applications, and provides you with tools for measuring and reporting on user processes. OpenSpan Desktop Analytics gives you an unprecedented level of visibility and insight about how users work and how processes can be improved for greater productivity.

Both products run a piece of their technology on the desktop to capture the user activity. Google requires you to insert Google Tracking Javascript code that gets loaded when a page loads. The visitor activity is then tracked and sent to the Google database servers to allow you run reports on it. There are even 3rd party analytics applications that you can use to report the data in different ways. OpenSpan Desktop Analytics™ runs a small program on your enterprise desktop that captures end user desktop application activity and sends the data to an enterprise database. Out of the box reports, or any 3rd party reporting tool can be applied to this data to provide businesses with a 360 degree view of user desktop activity

Whilst we all recognize how important products like Google analytics are to our business to track what our visitors are doing on our external web sites, it has been virtually impossible to analyze what our own users are doing on their individual desktops. Yet people are often the biggest cost to the enterprise! You might at this point be thinking – “big brother”! On the contrary, you might already know your 1000 seat contact center agents are handling calls on average in 6 minutes. You might know your insurance back office is able to process 1000 claims an hour, or financial center can approve 875 mortgages a day. However, do you know why some of your users are faster than others? Are all users following the right procedures (compliance)? Are your agents using the right applications at the right time? Why is one branch generating more after work than another? Are you users running applications they shouldn’t? Sitting idle too long? Need more training?

Very few of these questions could be answered before desktop analytics. Visibility to what your core task workers and call center agents are doing has been limited in the past to manual time and motion studies.

If you haven’t seen it before, check out OpenSpan Desktop Analytics and start figuring out, at last, exactly what goes on in your department or business.

Ouch, over a year?

Damon Lockwood — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 17:32:00 +0000

Can’t believe it’s been over a year since I posted. Things were busy. So here’s the latest:

I’m now CTO of OpenSpan. I’ve taken on a lot of additional responsibilities around product strategy and customers, which leads to…

Stephen is now Chief Scientist. He’s officially the undisputed god of the deep, dark, awesome, unfathomable underpinnings or our technology and is devoting himself full-time to internals and RE, which leads to…

Danny is now VP of Development. He’s taking over running our team operationally, delivering release and all that good stuff, which leads to…

We’re growing and we’re hiring. If you’re a data guru (NoSQL, MySQL, Hadoop) or a cloud guru (Ruby, AWS) or a web guru (HTML, jQuery, CSS) or a reverse engineering guru (injection, hooking, disassembly) let me know!

Happy Birthday Twitter!

Marcelo Jabali — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 01:32:00 +0000

I’m a big fan of Twitter and from the business perspective I see a lot possibilities and use cases where Twitter could add a lot of value. This week Twitter is celebrating its 5th anniversary and I came across this post from one of the founders (Biz Stone – @biz) and I think the video they put together is just amazing… Check it out! http://blog.twitter.com/2011/03/happy-birthday-twitter.html

OpenSpan Application Usage Events

Marcelo Jabali — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 20:42:00 +0000

OpenSpan is innovating again and customers/partners are now able to enjoy another great capability. In a new release, OpenSpan is including new events capabilities for monitoring application usage metrics for all applications on the desktop without touching them. Yeah! You got that right… No need for application interrogation, no need for touch the applications you want to get metrics from. That’s an amazing opportunity to understand more about patterns and metrics from the user’s desktop.

There are now three categories of events that OpenSpan can work with: Application Usage Events, Application Detail Events (Generic), Custom Business Events.

Application Usage Events

With minimal configuration and no application interrogation required, deploy OpenSpan to user desktops and immediately begin collecting high-level application usage and interaction metrics for all applications running on the user’s desktop. This new capability provides unprecedented insight into user experience and productivity, enabling next generation time & motion studies of both before and after process improvements.

Application Detail Events

Application Detail Events are used when you want to capture more detail for specific applications than what is provided by Application Usage Events. With Application Detail Events, you can capture individual events (i.e. click, text change, copy, paste, key-press, etc.) and data values associated with any application object (field, button, checkbox, etc.) on any screen within an application. This capability provides “clickstream-level” granularity. For example, you might use Application Usage Events to determine how many copy/paste events are occurring in each application. Then you enable Application Detail Events to determine which fields (by name) are being copied. Application Detail Events are configurable by application and enable selection from over 30 distinct object types and on average over 10 events per object type. To capture Application Detail Events, interrogation and filter configuration is required for each application, which typically takes only a few minutes to configure per application.

Custom Events

Custom Business Events (or Custom Events) provide the ability to define and instrument complete workflows and processes spanning one or several applications. Event names are user-defined and Custom Events can be configured to contain any additional data you wish to collect or capture. In addition to capturing performance metrics and detailed process timing information, Custom Events can include conditional logic and can be used to generate alerts. Custom Events are also commonly the interface point and published from OpenSpan to partner CEP, WFM, BAM and BPM solutions.

Ok… I gave up…

Marcelo Jabali — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 22:59:00 +0000

Not the best way to start a blog (I know) but I’ve been thinking about blogging and the content to start one for a long time and I just figured out that would be better to keep the context of my posts around Information Technology and computer-related stuff…

I’ve been for a long time on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook but blogging is kind of new to me. Well, we all have to start somehow, right? Here is my first stab at this where I plan to share useful information about things that I find on the road (when traveling to customer’s sites), articles from the Internet or something that I’ve in mind that someone can reuse out there.
So, I gave up holding the idea of start blogging…

By the way, my name is Marcelo Jabali and I’ve been working with technology since 1998. Most of my work is around systems integration, Service-Oriented Architecture and application design and architecture. I’m also a Mac fan and all things Apple.

Stay tuned for more… Feel free to contact me, right comments, send questions and let’s enjoy the Wonderful World of blogging and sharing information together!

Enterprise UI’s looking to get in on Consumer Web UI Bandwagon?

Francis Carden — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 16:02:00 +0000

Thought I’d point you guys to a nice blog post I came across recently. Derek Singleton, ERP Market Analyst, Software Advice, did a survey on the “Ten Consumer WEB UI themes We’d Like to see in Business Applications“.

I posted a reply over there that I thought was very applicable to this whole debate around the User Experience and my passions on it at OpenSpan.

Net Net, we keep piling applications onto our user desktops and rarely do we think about the user experience or how to make the user more productive through the UI. Derek’s survey proves we are not thinking enough given his survey results!

I would also add that I am not a big fan of the major inconsistent UI’s in either the enterprise or consumer world either, i.e. why does the stop button not actually do a stop and leave me on the page I was on. Why does the back button not do a true back when it can (it really is a Refresh last which is a pain on a slow PDA connection) and why by default does a backspace do a back (which can happen frequently by accident when not in a text box and causes a loss of work).. amongst many “web” UI grievances I have.

I hope Derek (and I’d be happy to help) starts getting more granular in this UI discussion. We take desktop apps and improve (through automation) the manual navigation around the UI’s that results in our customers saving millions of dollars per year in productivity gains (User Process Improvement). In many cases tens of millions of dollars!

Don’t blame IT for integration failures.

Francis Carden — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 20:40:00 +0000

I’ve now been in technology for over 30 years. I don’t feel old, I just started young! In addition, it seems I’ve been doing a lot of the same things and it’s only now I’ve started to realize it’s really ALL all been around integration and process improvement.

My first job was taking mailing address reply-address cards and typing the info into a pretty dumb green screen application (Reality PICK system). I didn’t like the process so I taught myself programming to make the UI and data entry easier and faster. Into the code I went, writing shortcuts for auto filling large parts of the addresses, auto formatting and validating phone numbers, auto searches for checking there were no duplicates and if there were, automating the merging of the records. Sure there was only one server and only one UI, but writing technology to make this single process more integrated (and more efficient) was really the start of my IT career. I was hooked and from then on built on the art of making things easier for users.

I moved onto writing performance monitoring and benchmarking tools after that, trying to automate the processes that would find ways to make things go faster. Trying to squeeze every usable drop out of the CPU by eliminating code that wasn’t necessary or was written badly. When our “mainframe” added support for more than one printer for a payroll application, I found the code to be so bad as to slow down both printers to the point they were printing slower than one printer (buffer sizes were tiny back then). That was known as contention or thrashing. I’d go to the server side code and work out myself how to fix it.

Then I started writing full enterprise applications. First in code and then moved onto 4GL’s. I was the first to report to my CEO that our claims that our 4GL runtimes were slower by a factor of 3, not faster as we had been claiming. I even wrote the application again in code, deliberately bad enough to replicate what I knew the 4GL had to do differently. Alas the 4GL runtimes were extremely poor by comparison. Instead of being fired by my CEO, I was promoted into the performance/benchmarking improvement teams. We optimized so much technology over the years, everything from hard drive buffering and striping to CPU management to building assembler objects to help developers code run faster.

I formed my first company at the age of 25. Simply, we were a terminal emulation company with a twist. We enabled enterprise applications (mainframe / server side) to be integrated with the new UI’s (DOS, then Windows). Lipstick on a pig it was sometimes called but it truly delivered faster, cleaner and fully integrated user experiences than traditional silo’d UI’s at the time. It solved what used to be called swivel chair integration problems. We sold over 500,000 seats so I like to think it served a purpose. I also know today, 22 years on, people out there are still using “my” intelligent terminal emulation to do their jobs. HOSTACCESS, now owned by RougeWave.

So what does this all have to do with our failures in Integration I hear you ask? Be patient, I’m nearly there.

First, almost from the very birth of IT, integration was an issue. If two people each build an application or process, almost immediately there is likely a need for these 2 bits of code to work together. If neither coder knew of the other than chances are, making those 2 applications work together would be hard to impossible without some form of re-engineering. Sure, both coders could have made their applications “open” (maybe we call that services today) but even then, there is no guarantee that the services would be compatible, that the interfaces would be logical or even that the business logic would be the same. Even if you successfully integrate these two, along comes the 3^rd coder with their application and off we go again but now we can’t risk changing the 1^st or the 2^nd coders interfaces or business logic for fear of breaking something for the customers using those first two interfaces. Okay, to fix that, we could just make a copy and of each of the first two applications and make them work with the third. Ah, so now there are five apps. We are now on the exponential interface path. To the power of n, our integration woes are born.

Second, as if anyone is in any doubt, that integration isn’t simple, just look at the fact that enterprises have users commonly using 4, 5 6 or even over 10 applications on their desks to do their jobs. Copy and paste rules. Sad but true, right? Unless you are a big bank, with $100’s of millions to invest in re-architecting or re-engineering to a single common UI, then your users are likely living in an silo’d un-integrated world. Sure you may have some integration working but the truth lies in what your users are doing. If it’s just one application with easily navigatable workflows then congratulations, you deserve lots of credit. Chances are, you’ll have more apps and UI’s next year than this. Keep those copy paste keys warm!

So you see, technological advances have not really changed very much since I was doing this 27+ years ago. Sure we have greater technology and the processes are different but as a user – at the coalface, are you really better off?

Difficult to blame IT because even if you are one of the lucky organizations to be able to move to just a single application and UI, I bet you, it won’t be long before your organization buys up or merges with another company and you’ll be back to square one again.

What I have been a proponent of, for over 20 years are standards in API’s. And as importantly, standards for API’s at the front end as well as the back end. Today, as always, we are building applications where the business logic crosses 2,3 4 or more layers (the database (triggers, rules) ), server side (deployment, scale), the server side logic, client side (scripts, multiple UI platform, devices) and even more logic on logic rules in between.

How can we blame IT when we have had more standards pushed down the throats of IT in the last 20 years than there are adapters for our mobile devices :)

API’s for UI’s are as important as the API’s for or services so that whatever a developer builds, in any of these layers can quickly and efficiently, be lightly coupled with other API’s. Time to market for business is huge and IT can focus on deliver ingthis to their organization. Time to come together, once and for all. First end the blame game and then play the “results” game.

Process Optimization is not just a job at the server, never has been, never will be.

Why we like competition at OpenSpan

Francis Carden — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 20:54:00 +0000

Over the past couple of months we have had over a half dozen different companies squatting on our company name and buying “OpenSpan” as a Google AdWord. We do our best to chase them away but they always return. This activity does not surprise us one bit. Every time we see a major win or talk about our growth (60% in the past year and 400% in the past 4 years) the squatting picks up. And with customer wins and growth rates increasing I expect to see more companies trying to jump on the OpenSpan band wagon.

The latest squatter is Verint. You would think that a company that spends more on Selling and G&A than they do on their products would be able to come up with something more creative than trying to pick up the scraps that fall off of the OpenSpan table.

For those that don’t know Verint, they describe themselves in the following way;

Verint® Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: VRNT) is a global leader in Actionable Intelligence® solutions and value-added services. Our solutions capture, distill, and analyze complex and underused information sources, such as voice, video, and unstructured text, to enable organizations to make timely and effective decisions. Today, more than 10,000 organizations in 150 countries — including over 80 percent of the Fortune 100 — use our solutions to improve enterprise performance and make the world a safer place.

If you want additional information on Verint, just Google “OpenSpan” and click on the Verint Advertisement “desktop monitoring”. This will take you to a great white paper, titled “Desktop and Process Analytics”. If you like what you see give them a call and check out their products. Once you understand their products give OpenSpan a call. We don’t mind because we want you to look at the others, before you see the best :)

Everyone is using OpenSpan like technology already!

Francis Carden — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 19:29:00 +0000

You take it for granted when you click on a hyperlink and your browser is opened (if not already opened) and the page behind the link is displayed in that browser. Marvelous.

You also take it for granted when you click on an email address and your preferred email program composes a new blank message to the person on the link. Lovely.

Both of these actions (what OpenSpan calls automations) save you time and are very convenient (better than just select, copy, alt-tab, click, paste, enter keys, right?). And that’s just two simple processes and two applications that are involved. But the time saved is massive over a day, week or year.

However most enterprise applications, or even newer cloud applications were never designed for any of this basic kind of intelligence. Users go, day in, day out, learning and manually executing probably 100′s of tasks across the multiple applications they have open. These manual steps should be unnecessary. The computer has all the knowledge and it’s a computer it should know, right? It just hasn’t been taught how the apps could work together.

If you could wave a wand over your applications to make it easier to automate the stuff they do, can you imagine the time and money the organization would save? OpenSpan customers have used OpenSpan for 1000′s of use cases that do just that, and the time savings can be staggering. At first, so staggering as to be unbelievable, but not when you sit down and do the math on someones time over a year! Some customer user cases;

– 55 clicks for an agent to run a specific task to deal with just one type of call – now just ONE click
– $30m saved on the first project by cutting time out of caller verification step for every agent. More automation projects took this customer rapidly to over $100m saving – each and every year
– 6x the number of back office transactions processed with the same number of people
– 23 apps required to learn for a single process dropped to just 3 (the other 20 apps were hidden for simplicity once they were automated)
– 6 hour new account signup process requiring many apps and department involvement – now 6 minutes
– Sent an old DOS app to the server room. The functionality was automated and exposed as a web service
New Insurance quote, project for large insurance company cut quote times over the phone from 12 minutes to 10 minutes – and this saving was shown JUST during the POC stage (1 week).

And the list goes on. This is why the OpenSpan IDE is now free. We know, every company in the world, whether they have 10 users or 10,000 users, have a need for at least some automation to make their users more efficient and thus, save a lot of time and money for that organization. The next time you think an automation would be a nicety, cool or a necessity, think OpenSpan and give it a try, you’ve got nothing to lose :)