Thursday, December 2, 2010

12 Days of Christmas for the Call Center

Having a bit of fun and reflecting on what pains I've seen in the last 6 years working so closely with my Call Center friends and family. Enjoy.

12 Days of Christmas for the Call Center

On the First day of Christmas,
My agents said to me,
How long can our call times be.

On the Second day of Christmas,
My agents said to me,
Too many Apps,
How long can our call times be.

On the Third day of Christmas,
My Agents said to me,
Three ways to answer,
Too many Apps,
How long can our call times be.

On the Fourth day of Christmas,
My Agents said to me,
Four copy pastes,
Three ways to answer,
Too many Apps,
How long can our call times be.

On the Fifth day of Christmas,
My Agents said to me,
Five long calls,
Four copy pastes,
Three ways to answer,
Too many Apps,
How long can our call times be.

On the Sixth day of Christmas,
My Agents said to me,
Six Sigma praying,
Five long calls,
Four copy pastes,
Three ways to answer,
Too many Apps,
How long can our call times be.

On the Seventh day of Christmas,
My Agents said to me,
Seven phones-a-ringing,
Six Sigma praying,
Five long calls,
Four copy pastes,
Three ways to answer,
Too many Apps,
How long can our call times be.

On the Eighth day of Christmas,
My Agents said to me,
Eight alt-tabs a-tabbing,
Seven phones-a-ringing,
Six Sigma praying,
Five long calls,
Four copy pastes,
Three ways to answer,
Too many Apps,
How long can our call times be.

On the Ninth day of Christmas,
My Agents said to me,
Nine callers hate me, 
Eight alt-tabs a-tabbing,
Seven phones-a-ringing,
Six Sigma praying,
Five long calls,
Four copy pastes,
Three ways to answer,
Too many Apps,
How long can our call times be.

On the Tenth day of Christmas,
My Agents said to me,
Ten new steps to follow,
Nine callers hate me,
Eight alt-tabs a-tabbing,
Seven phones-a-ringing,
Six Sigma praying,
Five long calls,
Four copy pastes,
Three ways to answer,
Too many Apps,
How long can our call times be.

On the Eleventh day of Christmas,
My Agents said to me,
Eleven leaders griping,
Ten new steps to follow,
Nine callers hate me ,
Eight alt-tabs a-tabbing,
Seven phones-a-ringing,
Six Sigma praying,
Five long calls,
Four copy pastes,
Three ways to answer,
Too many Apps,
How long can our call times be.

On the Twelfth day of Christmas,
My Agents said to me,
Twelve apps and growing,
Eleven leaders griping,
Ten new steps to follow,
Nine callers hate me ,
Eight alt-tabs a-tabbing,
Seven phones-a-ringing,
Six Sigma praying,
Five long calls,
Four copy pastes,
Three ways to answer,
Too many Apps,
How long can our call times be.

Merry Christmas.

Friday, November 19, 2010

Don’t blame IT for integration failures.

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 3rd coder with their application and off we go again but now we can’t risk changing the 1st or the 2nd 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.





Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Why we like competition at OpenSpan

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 :)



Sunday, August 15, 2010

Everyone is using OpenSpan like technology already!

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 :)

Friday, July 30, 2010

The UI - it's never standardized - GUI nightmares

How many User Interfaces did you use today? On the desktop, a UI for each application, maybe 3, 4, 5 or maybe 10 or more? What about your phone or PDA, your oven or your toaster? Your own car, your rental car? Your banks ATM, another banks ATM? Brought a train ticket, a top-up, a pay as you go? What about your TV remote? Do you have more than 1? I bet you do :) - So why are the UI's of even similar devices so different?

I've personally been involved in UI's in some guise in the enterprise for the last 30 years and I wanted to share some thoughts and ramblings with you. I've looked especially over these last 4 weeks, at 100's of applications from just about every vendor on the planet!

In the Enterprise, the UI is the entry point to the business applications for every employee and so should all be super consistent and allow the user to be super efficient. Truth is - the exact opposite is true. The only thing each of these UI's have in common, is that most have little in common with each other. They are frequently slow or hard to use. Even apps from the same vendor, a few years apart can have an entirely alien UI to the first version of the app. The training required today for all the different applications and tasks users have to undergo just to learn basic stuff, is still unbelievable. If the user wants a change to the UI, they are told NO or come back in 12 months! We had this problem 30 years ago didn't we? Do I press F8 or page up. Where's the home key. Why doesn't ESCape go back. Why are some fields red, yellow or green...  Where did the print go... Why do I lose my data if I switch off the "screen".. Why is the data on this tab... Why do I have 3 screens with different addresses... Why doesn't ALT-C always work... Right click, Whats the password again..

You get the picture. What I see every single day are users, using computers in a manual fashion (pressing lots of keys, remembering what they were taught, rekeying data, writing down passwords, tabbing, making mistakes etc.,) Is it the users fault? No. It's the UI's fault. It's a computer so why can't it automate some or all of these "manual" steps in 2010. The desktop PC has all the information to automate much of the task but there's no connection of apps at the UI so you train a user to do it manually. How very not 2010 slick!

The problem arises from the fact that even though we are moving to more web applications, each developer builds their web application differently (Adobe, Java, HTML 5, JScript, ActiveX, Silverlight, Custom). Good developers rarely are good at doing the UI and in fact most hate having to do a UI. So there you have it, each UI ends up being different within the web and outside the web (Mainframe Green Screen, Java, Fat Client) and the user ends up doing all their tasks - manually.

So what if, all of the UI's out there could be enhanced instantly with an open API that would enable them to be bridged to make them work together as one. Automating the millions of applications and billions of daily user tasks would become a breeze, wouldn't it.

That's what OpenSpan has spent the last 5 years doing. Using advanced hooking and injection technology (UI DNA recognition system) to sit inside all of these millions of UI's and open them up for almost instant automation. Any user process or task can be automated. This is the new breed of Business Process Improvement (BPI) technology that sits under the OpenSpans User Process Management umbrella. This is game changing. Better yet, OpenSpan has made this so easy, it is available to try by anyone, as a free download from download free IDE - ENJOY

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Enterprise Users still use PC's to do things manually... you're kidding right?

Nope. We spend vast sums of money around the nation giving PCs to End users, and then even more vast sums of money training them on how to interact with the applications running on those PCs. Not only is the training and people cost associated with using these applications a large portion of all companies expenditure, but here in 2010, very little has ever been achieved in reducing this spend (at least without negatively impacting productivity or customer service).

Doesn't that sound mad? Not really! Your TV is digital, right? Maybe connected over a fiber backbone down the street to a satellite receiving digital signals at light speed so you can watch live television, right? But equally, you are also probably using one or more plain jane AA battery powered remote controls where you teach yourself, your spouse and maybe your kids on how to change channels, set the volume, record, skip, play etc., All that awesome technology underneath and you are still forced into these manual steps. Sometimes perhaps even having to get out of your chair to turn the amplifier on manually!

So where am I going with this blog rant? The User Interface (UI) of course.

You see, no matter how much money we invest in technology, we have still not cracked making the UI any easier. Users spend weeks being trained to perform steps that the computer is perfectly capable of doing for them. Deficiencies in UI design across multiple applications prevent this though. Manual processes costs our businesses vast sums of money in what I call AWT (Average Wasted Time). Life sucks for the end user - big time - because the UI leads to so much wasted time, on every single desktop. You can't blame the user for what the UI forces them to do - badly!

What if (drum rolls please), every application our users use, were written by the same programmer with the same goal; to simply enable those desktop apps to talk to each other so all manual steps could be eliminated. That would be nice... BUT... (sigh's please)... considering most applications were written by different people, some many years ago even, you don't see this ever being likely in your lifetime, do you?

But finally you will (trumpets please)... OpenSpan has perfected a technology which can get inside any application (without coding) and bring old and new applications alive so they can participate in being automated, for any of the tasks a user would perform manually in the past. Often said by early prospects "this is too good to be true" - OpenSpan is proud, not only to have close to 120,000 enterprise users using our desktop automation technology, but ALSO, changing the way software on the desktop (UI's) are written. Game changing. It's no wonder companies are saving $100's of millions using OpenSpan. Automating people / processes = massive ROI -

Download it for free to try it here... If you think your user would benefit from one of many automations, just try it, and see if it works for you. Nothing to lose... Download Free OpenSpan IDE here.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

OpenSpan Studio 4.5 - GA release candidate now available for free download

The OpenSpan Development team is pleased to make available OpenSpan Studio 4.5, Release Candidate 1 (RC1). This is the latest preview release of the next version of the OpenSpan Studio development platform. Our testing community and users who want to get a look at the next version of OpenSpan Studio should download and install this release candidate. 
Our goal behind releasing 4.5 RC1 is to ensure that we get broad testing and feedback on the performance and stability enhancements we’ve made since the last public Beta 2 release. Over the last few months we’ve been releasing interim builds to a small number of users who have been helping us validate fixes and measure very large projects and solutions. The feedback from them has been extremely positive, which is why we are opening up today’s build to a much wider audience.
This release, which was initially released as Beta 1 in December, 2009 and Beta 2 in February, 2010, includes many new features and enhancements to improve both developers’ and users’ experiences. To learn about what’s new in OpenSpan Studio 4.5 RC1, read the OpenSpan Studio 4.5 RC1 Release Notes.
Your feedback in our forums is highly encouraged to help us decide what needs to be fixed for final release.

Saturday, April 24, 2010

Product v Services

Coming back from Oracle Collaboration 2010 show this week, it struck me what a difference having a product makes to our business. Talking to so many partners at this event, it is clear that the fact the OpenSpan technology is delivered as a product is key. That it can be installed in less than a minute enabling automation and integrations to be built with minimal training (online even), is a massive advantage.

On speaking with them, I found a large number had tried "competitive" products in the past but each time their business units got frustrated they had to build a complex services engagement around each deal that requires a lot of support once (and if) that customer went live. I pull out my laptop and show them a 3 minute demo and they get it - we are a true product! I can show them how to automate or integrate with an SAP activeX control grid in 10 seconds, or a Siebel app with embedded java applets or a custom windows app built over 10 years ago!  It's so nice. I can even tell them where to go to download a free copy now. Now that's "putting your money where you mouth is" IMHO :) I don't know a single competitor that can do that!

I can tell these partners we have tons of live customers (that they can call for references), large and small that installed our "product" around or on top of competing products in the past (where our competitors failed to deliver before us, despite being in that account first).  One such customer brought 2000 seats back about 4 years ago. They have since added approximately 1000 more seats each year, and now at 6000 users. Another customer, sold to over 3 years ago, is now at over 20,000 live seats. Now that's not just proof we work, but proof we stand the test of time in real accounts and use cases are being found all the time to keep building on the value.

For these partners, I can also tell them our product is also OEM'd or embedded into loads of other products as well. Like at IBM and Aspect. Sure these companies could have chosen to build their own solutions but we are good at what we do and can prove to our partners, we can deliver them what they need to help close deals with their customers. Again, tons of existing customers and partners that prove we can do it.

What a lot of people do not know when I joined OpenSpan, was that I told them, "unless you have a product, I am not interested in being involved". I had seen too many so called products fail at customer sites by frustrating them on being oversold on ease of use. There is no silver bullet for integration but I think OpenSpan is one of the closest you'll see. One example, I have seen a customer build a solution, installed into production, with 1 person in under 12 weeks and that solution saves that customer around $2m a month. I know it sounds unbelievable but before OpenSpan, they had no choice but to do everything manually. Another customer, looking at it another way, will save over $300m through automation over a 3 year period. Now that's an ROI :)

We at OpenSpan are also not standing still. Each time we deliver, not only will our "PRODUCT" be better at saving you more $money, but it'll get easier and easier to do each time.

Monday, April 12, 2010

Not using OpenSpan? You could be losing $millions

I couldn't believe the response we have been seeing to the new download program. The fact that you can now be your own superstar and save your company $100,000's or $Millions of dollars. Just by downloading our product, building some slick and quick automations in a few hours and see how much you can save - all without leaving your chair or spending a dime up front.  Some real use cases;

Back office Automation - Finance. Process 500% more transactions a day with the same people by automating the end users manual navigations between mainframe, spreadsheets and web (Java) applications. The savings quite literally are over $15m a year. 10 weeks to build/QA/Pilot and go live!

Back Office Automation - Finance. Processing times cut by over 90% for opening new accounts whilst assuring compliancy with ever changing rules. Implemented in weeks.

Call Center Automation - Finance. Call times cut by 28% for managing customer account queries spread over multiple systems. Automated Process Guidance implemented to ensure ease of workflows.

Call Center Automation - Telecoms. Automated almost entire Caller verification process spread over multiple systems. Saved over $30m on first project in first year alone through reduced AHT.

Call Center Automation - Insurance. Reduced time to update multiple systems from 35 minutes to under 10 minutes.

We have hundreds of automation examples like this, hundreds. We have customers who use us where they have just 1 desktop user using it (even zero users in unattended mode) and we have organizations where we are installed, in production on over 20,000 user desktops.

The point is, by downloading the OpenSpan product you don't' have to wait months before you see the benefits. OpenSpan is a true product. Download it, build something big or small and if it's going to save you money, and lots of it, as it likely will, move it into production. Then, keep building and keep saving.

That's what I mean about being a true product. We can save you a ton of money, and start saving it for you, right now. It costs nothing to try. www.openspan.com/community

You don't even need to be a hard core developer, just have some basic "programatic" thinking skills and you'll be automating in minutes with the OpenSpan Studio product! But if you are a hardcore developer, that's OK too, you can run OpenSpan Plug-in for Visual Studio and write code, or mix and match between the visual workflow designer and your favorite programming language! You can choose.

Monday, April 5, 2010

OpenSpan Studio 4.5 is Now Available In Public Beta - for free

Well, the big day has arrived that I have been hinting at for some months now.

OpenSpan Studio is available for the first time as a public beta. More importantly, OpenSpan Studio is now available, at no cost, for anyone to download and evaluate from this day forward.

Yes, you heard that right. This is game changing stuff for desktop integration and automation. Our full IDE, OpenSpan Studio is now available at no cost. Few other companies are so confident in their integration platform that they are willing to open it up to anyone, anywhere, to try.

Anything you build in OpenSpan Studio can be fully tested within the IDE. A new subscription pricing model is available for the runtimes you move into a production environment for OpenSpan Enterprise and OpenSpan Events. Both of the runtimes will be available for purchase from our soon to be available online store, in time for the GA release.

We have nearly 400 OpenSpan Studio developers and partners whom have been through certified training at one of training centers and certification is now also available online. Learn the product yourselves in-house or work with our partners, the choice us yours.

The other big piece that brings all of this together is the OpenSpan Community. We are today announcing the community website at www.openspan.com/community. From here you will find the downloads, samples, help, blogs, feeds and forums etc., to get you started and more importantly, allow you to be part of a growing community of OpenSpan users, developers and partners. 

OpenSpan Studio 4.5 is a major new release with literally hundreds of new features and capabilities so that is why this is being released as for the first time as a beta program. We encourage all of our new and existing community members to check this out and give us feedback through these forums. This will be a thriving wealth of knowledge so please take the time to check it out and participate.

Remember, there are over 100,000 users out there already, using OpenSpan on their desks, day in day out, in mission critical environments at contact centers, financial services, Government and healthcare organizations. They are running OpenSpan because it provides the most rapid and robust desktop integration solutions on the market and saving them collectively, $100’s of millions of dollars a year. One customer saved over $30m a year with their first desktop automation project. Another customer, saves over $1m a month through automating back-office processes. Another customer cut costs by over 50% by automating laborious end user manual steps. There are loads of customer users cases we can share. Saving money from automation is a no brainer, having a product like OpenSpan that enables you to do this quickly, with it’s visual designer is also, a no-brainer.

Our first customers, over 4 years ago are still using it today, 4 years on and adding more users each and every year. Plain and simple, OpenSpan projects save money, and lots of it, time and time again. Automations,  mash-ups, integrations, monitoring and the many more use cases you'll think of too for our product, are all the reason you need to check it out and make yourself a super-star dynamic money saver in your own organization!

Check out Damons blog too here; http://doitonthedesktop.blogspot.com/ announcing the 4.5 product and the free download.

I have talked a little about the 4.5 features in previous posts and will cover them again in the next few blogs. Needless to say, OpenSpan can now be used within Visual Studio as well if you so wish. It’s optional. The OpenSpan Studio stand-alone version still supports the full visual design paradigm for the rapid drag-and-drop automations it’s existing customers know and love so well.

Enjoy. We'll enjoy your company in our community.


Monday, February 8, 2010

Next Generation Time and Motion (OpenSpan Events)

Contact Centers have for years realized the importance of monitoring everything they possibly can in their contact centers. From capturing handling times, recording screens, monitoring AHT, wait times, first call resolution rates, the $ cost per second on the phone, the $ cost of a lost customer and so very much more.

But what's missing I hear you say? I say, how can you possibly know what's missing? Especially if you don't know what other things can be measured.

So, since you don't know, let me tell you. Did you know, you can now monitor all activity, down to a granular level, of anything a user can do on their desktop? I'm not talking just what applications they started or stopped. That's easy. I am talking down to a granular level of monitoring every user interaction with every application and with each object inside that application. This computer generated "DNA" for each workflow has been the missing piece of enterprise analytics for years (unless you put a six sigma (time and motion) person at every desktop 24x7 with pencil, paper and a stopwatch!

Think of it, just pick one workflow in your organization. Say a mortgage refinance or to add a new device to a customers current plan. You know there are 6 or 10 applications involved in the workdlow. You know on average it takes a certain number of minutes to complete a task. You know you've trained everyone the same. BUT - what did each of your users REALLY do? in what applications? for how long? What buttons were pressed? what status was the customer in? How long before the agent went to the correct knowledge base article? Were the handling times of agents going to the knowledge base first, more or less than those agents who went there later in the workflow or not at all? What did the agents do in your Arizona contact center that made them 20% more productive than agents say in Georgia, except on Fridays after 3pm!

You see, when you really do see - into the heart of every workflow, on every desktop, with every application / human interaction, every field change, every button click. well, you get the point.

Desktop Analytics has been missing and it was a logical step for OpenSpan to takes it's Automation injection technology and have it monitor. Hence you have OpenSpan Events today. Run it on you users desktop and that's it. little to no configuration (unless you want to). I think Desktop Analytics is here and it's here to stay. Check it out. http://www.openspan.com/Products/OpenSpanEvents.php