“What can we do to call more attention to the problem of Information Overload?” is a question I still hear regularly.   Last year we came up with an answer:  participate in Information Overload Awareness Day, a new workplace observance that calls attention to the problem of information overload and how it impacts both individuals and [...]

Enterprise-wide projects require clear vision and effective leadership. This is especially true if your company engages in business process management (BPM) with the goal of maximizing efficiency gains enterprise wide. Since your everyday processes are built around your mission-critical content, a thorough understanding of your data, routine processes, and the interrelationship of one business area to the next is crucial.

Establishing a grand vision isn’t necessary for a successful enterprise content management (ECM) and BPM implementation. Developing and communicating a clear vision based on an understanding of your company’s long-range goals, prioritization of needs, and knowledge of constraints, however, is.

Assemble the right team

Establishing a vision for BPM requires a strong team comprised of executive-level and IT leadership, line-of-business managers, and a dedicated project leader. Since a detailed understanding of your company’s content (data) and how it is used daily is vital, ground-level knowledge workers must also be represented on the team. Their involvement in day-to-day information gathering and processing brings critical knowledge and valuable insights into how your business operates, as well as potential improvements. As your team defines long- and short-term goals, understanding your current processes is as important as defining long-term business needs, technology capabilities, and budget constraints.

BPM requires that you view your business as a series of intertwined processes driven by people, data, and events. The data that feeds and drives your processes may be found in legacy systems, line-of-business software applications, paper, voice mails, and other media. Wherever it resides, it must be accessed, controlled, and manipulated intelligently so you can leverage it wherever it’s needed to drive efficiency. Understanding the sources and function of data within your organization is vital.

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“Pay attention in class” is something many pupils have heard from their teachers, but what exactly does it mean to pay attention? We define the phrase “to pay attention” as meaning to “heed” or “be attentive to.” In the workplace, especially when it comes to knowledge work, we need to understand it as being much more, namely as a complex cognitive ability.

Hold your head for better concentration

In 1890, William James, in his textbook Principles of Psychology, provided what has become the classic definition of attention:

“Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in French is called distraction, and Zerstreutheit in German.”

We also know that attention has its own circuitry in the brain and that specialized networks carry out various functions, namely achieving and maintaining alertness, the control of thoughts and feelings, and orienting to sensory events.

But paying attention isn’t a simple, straightforward act. The barrage of information and interruptions makes it extremely difficult to do so.

There are, however, ways to cut back on the multitasking and interruptions, shaping your own environment and work style so that you better use your attentional networks. If you have a difficult problem or a conundrum to solve, you need to think about where you work best. Right now, people seem to hope they’ll be able to think or create or problem-solve in the midst of a noisy, cluttered, and interrupted environment. However, to optimize your attention, quiet and uninterrupted time is a far better starting point.

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex.

As I argued in my previous post “Why traditional intranets fail knowledge workers” (originally named “Serving the long tail of information needs”) there’s a long tail of information needs to be served within knowledge intensive enterprises, and which can’t be served with the use of traditional intranets.

Organizations typically try to serve their employee’s information needs by producing varying types of content (text, images, video…) which is intended to communicate a message to, inform, the employees. Due to limited resources, all information needs cannot possibly be served. The line needs to be drawn somewhere, and it’s usually drawn where the cost of providing a certain kind of content exceeds the potential value of the information that the receivers can gain when extracting information from the content (assuming that the value is created when the content is actually consumed, i.e. transforming into information by the receiver). This is illustrated by the dashed horizontal link in the Long Tail power law graph for information needs illustrated below.

Although sometimes blunt and misguiding (as when there is information which is supposed to be never be used, but yet is absolutely critical to provide access to – such as a Standard Operating Procedures for emergency situations in a power plant), content usage rate (or popularity, if you like) is the easiest way to estimate the value of a certain piece of content, and thereby the information extracted from it. The reasoning is simple; if many people request a certain kind of information, it is likely they see value in it. So if many employees request a certain kind of information, it is likely to be valuable enough for the organization to supply that information to them.

Then what’s the cost of information? Well, a simple way to define it is to define it as the sum of all activities that it takes to supply an audience with a certain kind of information. The lower the cost, the more information needs we can serve. That’s basically why we use media and information technology – to lower the supply costs of information.

Assuming this is true for a lot of the information needs that exists over time in an organization, then the organization have two major challenges to address concerning all the information needs that make the cut (has a value / cost above 1):

1. Make sure the information is, if possible, captured into some content and made accessible.
2. Make sure the content is as easy to access and consume (interpret and understand) as possible

The second challenge usually presents great potential for improvements in most organizations. You might be familiar with the now classic the IDC report from 2001 by analyst Susan Feldman, “The high cost of not finding information” (which you can read about in this whitepaper). Feldman’s research showed that average knowledge workers spent 15% to 35% of their workday searching for information. 15% of the time was spent on duplicating existing information and searchers are successful in finding what they seek 50% of the time or less. Even though 10 years have passed since the findings of the research was presented, I’m pretty sure it holds true also today. As an example, Laurie Buczek,Social Media Strategist and Platform Vision Team Manager at Intel, partly motivated Intel’s investment in social computing in the following way:

“The average Intel employee dumps one day a week trying to find people with the experience & expertise plus the relevant information to do their job. We have calculated some of the $$ impact due to lost productivity and opportunity. Let me just say that it is motivating us to take action.”

Although the costs of not being able to find and access information fast enough are typically high, the costs of not being able to find a certain piece of information at all is potentially even greater. Rework, delays, suffering customer service, bad decision-making…you name it. All of these things happen frequently due to the lack of access to the right information in the right time – and quite often due to the fact that the information isn’t accessible in the first place.

These problems can partly be addressed by making sure all information that has been captured and encoded into content can be accessed and found by anyone who needs it. Yet, it is safe to say that the vast majority of all information and knowledge we have haven’t been captured and encoded into content. Sometimes because it can’t be, but as often as not it’s not been captured due to the high cost of capturing, storing, organizing, managing and delivering it.

The thing is that many orgs don’t bother much with the first challenge if they have just been able to produce and provide access to information that is worth managing. The problem is that there are lots and lots of valuable information which does not make the cut. Information that either never becomes accessible, or where access is very limited because it resides in email inboxes, in collaboration spaces that people won’t find or access unless they knows about it already and either has access or asks for it, on user desktops, on file servers not indexed by the intranet search engine, and do forth.

So what makes a certain piece of info worth managing? Well, if the value / cost quote is higher than 1, we’ll produce, store, organize, manage and distribute it to the users. Given that most of this content will be found in the long neck, that’s where we will focus most of our efforts and resources.

For content where the value / cost quote is equal to or lower than 1, we’re likely not going to manage it. We’ll much rather not produce or capture it. We’ll even delete it if already exists, so that it does not get in the way of other content that we need to manage.

Now, we should ask ourselves what would happen if the following was to become true:

• The cost of producing, storing, managing and distributing information decreases radically due to new practices and technologies
• The resources we have available to do this are not longer limited to a fraction of the workforce, but the entire workforce can be used, even resources from the outside – for free?

Would this change the game plan?


YES.

By coincidence, these things have now happened.

Thanks to the (technological) development during recent years, we now have technologies available which allow us to communicate and share information with other people, across time and space, in a variety of ways. If you need to have a rich, two-way and real-time conversation with an audience you do not know in advance and want anyone to be able to join, you can do that. If you only need to send a small text message to one specific recipient while you are out on a run in the park, you can do that. If you want to be able to discover, connect and collaborate with like-minded people across the globe who you don’t yet know, you can do that.

The access to these communication tools is also being democratized as virtually anyone who possesses basic computer skills and a device that can access the Internet can get access to and use the tools anytime and from anywhere they want. For free. No education or training required.

Until quite recently, the only way to reach a large audience with a message was to broadcast it via print (newspapers, books…), tv or radio. Now you can be a one-man media corporation and reach as many people as any of the big old media corporations. The great power than comes with mass-communication, which for long have been restricted to those who could afford to buy and own the production means and whp had the education and training required to operate the tools, that power is now available to anyone. That’s a really big shift which has lead to a sort of new Renaissance – one that is not restricted to an intellectual class, but which anyone can join by engaging with other people in the blogosphere, Twitter and Facebook.

As a result of these changes, more and more of the conversations where we exchange information and knowledge with each other are taking place online instead of face-to-face or via telephony. Content is produced as a bi-product of our conversations. With virtual collaboration becoming the norm even when we meet face-to-face or just need to talk to each other, the things we say and do are being captured and encoded into various forms of content such as voice, video, photos and text. The dark matter of the business universe is becoming visible and accessible as our business conversations are being captured instead of being transient and passing by without a notice, only touching a those individuals who participated in a specific conversation.

In short, the cost of communicating has collapsed.

What is interesting is how the information and knowledge exchanged through these various kinds of conversations now is easily captured and can be made available to people who did not participate in the conversation. Content is increasingly being created as a bi-product of conversations. This is to be contrasted with the typical approach where we capture and encode the information into content (documents etc) before it is communicated. For information that is encoded into content this way, one can definitely say that the cost of producing content has collapsed. And here lies the great opportunity when it comes to being able to serve the long tail of information needs; if the information exchanged in our conversations can easily be captured and shared, then some of this information is likely.

To do this we must first make it possible for people to find/discover, connect and communicate with each other in various ways (blogs, web conferencing, micro-blogging, IM/chat) so that the information can be captured into content (text, video, sound…). We must have a platform that empowers and a culture that encourages people to communicate and collaborate with each other.

We must also find ways to store and collectively organize the content so that it can be found or discovered and used by anyone who might need it. Here we can learn a lot from the social web and the use of Web 2.0 technologies and how search, tagging, links, and metadata created from explicit and implicit user activities to make information findable even when there is an abundance of information available to us.

Again, just as I argued in “Why traditional intranets fail knowledge workers”, we need to focus more on creating filters to handle the abundance of information than trying to stop the inflow of information. We need to stop seeing information supply as a problem to be solved (by trying to delimit it) and instead focus on how to satisfy information demand. By using information about our own social connections, the exchange we have with them, and the activities they do, we can employ social filtering techniques to “pull” relevant information. By letting not only any systems you use but also your friends and colleagues become aware of what you’re interested in, currently working on, planning to do, and so on, you can create an attraction to yourself that will “pull” relevant information to you, even information you didn’t know existed or you didn’t know you where looking for. Instead of having to spend a lot of time and effort on searching for information, you will get more of your information needs served by social filtering; manual and automatic recommendations on what information might be relevant for you.

To me it’s clear that most enterprises, especially knowledge intensive, need a platform that provides the capabilities which I have mentioned above. There are many reasons as it can help them make better use of shared knowledge, improve decision-making, increase agility and responsiveness, and facilitate innovation. If innovation, like Idris Motee says, “is like ping-pong”, it is because ideas need to be bounced back and forth before they mature and can attract the right people who can bring it to the market. If an organization really considers innovation to be important, it should engage everyone and make innovation everybody’s business. It should provide a ping-pong table, give every coworker, partner and customer a racket to play with, and invite them to play.

To me, it is a feasible (pragmatic) strategy to extend and transform the traditional intranet into a social intranet that incorporates these new capabilities. With the risk that using the term “intranet” adds terminology baggage that might cause problems, I have chosen to accept that the expression “social intranet” seems to stick to people’s minds. Using an existing term will likely help people learn about the new things faster than “Enterprise Social Software Platform” (ESSP) possibly could – at least during a transitional phase. There will certainly be a few who will just put lipstick on a pig and call it a “social intranet”, but I don’t expect that many people to be fooled to believe that adding some features such as commenting for corporate news stories and profile pages will really transform a traditional intranet into social intranet.

Most people will, if they’ don’t already, come to understand that a social intranet is not just about adding features such as blogs, wikis, activity feeds, social bookmarking and micro-blogging on top of a traditional intranet; it’s about rethinking the purpose of intranets with the intention of bringing the paradigm shift in how we communicate and collaborate that is taking place on the web to the very core of how enterprises are operated and managed. A social intranet needs to be seen as a strategic component when trying to do this.
Although the notion of social intranets is quite new, the business case for social intranets is anything but new. In fact, it has existed as long as there have been enterprises, and it’s growing stronger and stronger the more vital timely access to the right information and knowledge becomes for an enterprise in order to compete and thrive. The business case can easily be summarized, as in this quote from the 2001 IDC whitepaper mentioned above:

“While the costs of not finding information are enormous, they are hidden within the enterprise, and therefore they are rarely perceived as having an impact on the bottom line. Decisions are usually information problems. If they are made with poor or erroneous information, then they put the life of the enterprise at stake. Therefore, it behooves the enterprise to provide the best information-finding tools available and to ensure that all of its intellectual assets have access to them, no matter where they reside.”

It’s high time to start serving the long tail of information needs.

Oscar Berg posted
a useful piece on why traditional
intranets fail today's knowledge workers that I want to bring to your
attention. I heard about it through Twitter and Marcia Conner. Oscar starts
with some useful stats on the increasing amount of knowledge-based work. He
writes that a study by The Work
Foundation estimated
our workforce has 30 per cent in jobs with high knowledge content, 30 per cent
in jobs with some knowledge content, and 40 per cent in jobs with less
knowledge content. I think the numbers are higher for knowledge work but this
is still a lot.

Oscar notes that knowledge work is less
predictable and repeatable than traditional industry work. Move over Fred
Taylor. He adds that the structure of knowledge work typically emerges as the
work progresses. I would add that it is very context dependent and this argues
against the concept of best practices, at least the static kind.  This makes it hard to know in advance
what knowledge you need.  This
means that you need to place control over knowledge access in the hands of the
worker and not the system. It argues against scripted solutions.

Most traditional intranets do not provide the flexibility
for knowledge access that knowledge workers require.  As Oscar writes, “most of today’s intranets primarily consist
of pre-produced information resources which are intended to serve information
needs which can be anticipated in advance. They aim to serve people who perform
predefined and repeatable tasks.” This is so nineteenth century.

Now in the twenty first century we have the potential to
address these needs through a social intranet (aka enterprise 2.0).  This is more than a simply adding
collaboration tools. As Oscar writes, “It equips everyone with the tools that
allows them to participate, contribute, attract, discover, find and connect
with each other to exchange information and knowledge and/or collaborate.”  Ahem.

I have just given you the highlights. Hopefully this is
enough to make you want to read Oscar’s complete passage.

“I generally avoid temptation unless I can’t resist it.”
-Mae West

Temptation surrounds all of us and knowledge workers are not exempt; we are tempted daily by the allure of the Internet, social networking, news sites, and real-time communication with friends and colleagues.

Care for another?

These temptations must be avoided to remain productive, however, it appears that self-control isn’t a limitless resource: we can run out of it if we are not careful.

Exercising self-control is critical to being a productive worker.  Schedules must be kept, non-work activities must be kept to a minimum, and distractions must be filtered out.  Unfortunately, self-control is also finite.  Studies in both humans and animals have shown that resisting temptation depletes glucose levels, which in turn reduces the ability to focus on challenging tasks.

In one study, human volunteers were divided into two groups.  One group was told they may eat the provided chocolate chip cookies while the other group was told to not touch the cookies but to instead snack on some radishes.  Needless to say, the group eating the cookies was not exercising self-control by resisting the charms of the radishes, but the radish-eating group had to resist the appeal of the tasty cookies.

Both groups were then asked to complete an impossible puzzle, and the length of time they would commit before giving up was measured.  The cookie group lasted an average of 19 minutes before giving up, faring much better than the radish group who on average gave up after just eight minutes.

The study was repeated with dogs where one group did nothing and the other was asked to sit still for ten minutes (a mentally exhausting task for a dog), and then attempt to remove treats from a chew toy that had been altered to make it impossible.  The results were the same, the dogs who had already exerted self-control had far less patience for the new task.

The studies demonstrate two things.  One is that our ability to exert self-control is tied to glucose levels (so eat more snacks). The second is that the act of restraining ourselves is mentally and physically taxing.  By subjecting ourselves to temptation that we must actively resist, such as online distractions and constant communication, we degrade our ability to be effective at our jobs.

For reducing Information Overload and its impact, the answer (aside from more glucose), is that perhaps we have to remove temptation altogether, so we do not expend valuable energy controlling ourselves.  Basically, keep out of temptation’s way until you are done working.

Cody Burke is a senior analyst at Basex.

I
have covered SkillSoft before as they were moving in this direction (see SkillSoft Introduces More Web 2.0 Features with
SkillPort® 7.0 Learning Management System). Now SkillSoft has announced the launch
of inGenius, a social learning platform layer that enables
customers to securely enable their employees to find, create and share
knowledge assets and expertise with their colleagues as they leverage the
extensive SkillSoft library of on-demand learning assets. I was very interested
in this new move so I spoke with Pam Boiros of SkillSoft about
their offering.

Pam first went through several trends that helped
to prompt them to make this move. 
Learning has become more social and the interest in peer learning has
increased. I certainly agree with these observations. I have always been a
proponent of social and peer learning through such methods as simulation-based
learning going back to the 80s. It is great to see the rise of social computing
providing a much richer platform for this approach. 

There is also the move from learning as an event
to learning as a continuous process. This was one of the reasons I first got
involved in knowledge management in the 90s and now the line between learning
and KM is becoming even more blurred for good reasons.

To address these trends and take advantage of the
new capabilities that social computing and social networks can bring to
learning, SkillSoft’s Books24×7 division introduced inGenius. It enables social
learning by extending the value of expert information and infusing it with the
knowledge and expertise of an organization’s own employees. Unlike many
stand-alone social networking applications, inGenius is built on SkillSoft’s Books24×7
on demand content collections containing more than 25,000 titles — digital books from leading publishers, analyst
research reports, and white papers — as well as 1,300 videos of thought
leaders and practitioners. Below you can see a inGenius home page.

inGenius
enhances SkillSoft’s core learning assets with a feature set that enables
learners to leverage content assets as seeds of discussion and to add community
content (“co-content”) including notes, comments and ratings that add a unique
layer of context and relevance, specific to their organization. It further
enhances the social learning experience with opportunities to build connections
and allow sharing between learners. inGenius also enables learners to discover
knowledgeable colleagues by searching social profiles. Here is sample profile
page.

inGenius
is a free add-on to the Books24×7 offering. People can set up their own profile with recommended titles and
comments on works. They also have implemented the following model used by
Twitter so people can see the activities of those they respect. The activity
stream contains auto-generated updates based on activities such as adding
comments, rather than manually created tweets. You can click on a link in the
update to see the actual comment in the context of the relevant learning
material. I think this is a good approach for their content focused approach.
Here is a sample activity stream.

When
you do searches for content you now get additional returns on the people who
have commented on this content or recommended it, putting a great social
context to search, another good move. The addition of social
networking capabilities to a learning library makes great sense and SkillSoft
has done a great job with this release.

Remember portals? I
have heard about a number of cases where enterprise 2.0 collaboration systems
have replaced portals. One firm even replaced their portal with Facebook and
got a lot of PR for it. Is this a trend? I do not mean the Facbook part, just
the E20 part.

Perhaps but a recent
Forrester report, Portal Servers Refuse To Go Quietly, by Tim Waters found that
portals are still popular in many circles. As the report summary cited, “portal
server technologies continue to be widely deployed by enterprises. Although
leading vendors are evolving portal servers into broad content and
collaboration platforms, the core portal services — aggregation “on the glass”
and user authorization for access control and personalization — remain the
leading use cases. Newer alternatives, including open source platforms and mashups,
are gaining ground.”

So portals may remain
popular but they need to look over their c shoulders as the report also
recommended that, “knowledge management teams should carefully evaluate their
needs to determine if a portal server layer is appropriate.”  

Drawing for a survey
taken in North America and Europe, Q4 2009, they found that 20% of the firms
surveyed planned to expand or upgrade existing portal server implementations,
26% had already implemented and were not expanding while 15% planned to
implement over the next year or longer. 
 

There were some
concerns. Many users suffered from the complexity and the extensive
customization effort. I have seen many of these drawn out portal
implementations first hand.  They
can be the darling of the solutions integrators looking for big time projects
with ever expanding budgets.  The
report offers a number of instances of similar outcomes. It
also said that the majority of the users they interviewed were surprised by the
amount of customization required. 
I am not surprised at this finding as I have rarely seen a portal
project come in on budget or time.

Downsized budgets can
be an obstacle for new portal efforts. 
The report found that many firms indicated that the
move toward Lean and Agile development practices has encouraged them to
reevaluate the rule of heavy handed portal servers. The report encourages
knowledge management and IT people to be aware of the other options available. 

The term “expletive deleted” entered the lexicon in the 1970s when President Richard Nixon provided edited transcripts of internal White House discussions to the public with profane words and phrases indicated thusly.

President Nixon announcing his resignation in 1974.

Although most knowledge workers wouldn’t need this type of redacting, the problem of profanity in e-mail at Goldman Sachs has apparently reached critical mass and the firm announced that it will enforce a strict policy of no dirty words in electronic messages.  This action is notable because a June 2007 e-mail from a Goldman executive was extensively quoted at Senate hearings this past April, including the phrase  “that … was one s—– deal.”  The firm’s policy covers instant and text messages in addition to e-mail messages.

Our research tells us that the typical knowledge worker will receive 93 e-mail messages each day in addition to dozens of instant and text messages, not to mention phone calls and messages sent via social networks.

Knowledge workers have long complained that there is simply too much e-mail but, until recently, profanity in e-mail was not a huge concern.  However, the use of naughty words in some organizations has reached epic proportions.  The news about Goldman and e-mail has been making headlines in the business press and one comment posted on the Wall Street Journal Web site was telling.

Arun Nisargand wrote: “I am amazed at the lack of professionalism on the Wall Street and the investment banking community.  In the engineering community and large Fortune 500 corporation where I work, profanity has never been a issue.  It is not used or tolerated.  In verbal, written or e-mail communication.  There is no written policy or directive.  We just know how to behave.”

While cleaning up one’s language may indeed be an admirable pursuit, the emphasis on dirty words (think George Carlin) obfuscates the real problem, which is that we send too much e-mail period.

Perhaps, however, some good will come out of this, namely that the 34,000 people will, as a result of the new policy, end up sending fewer e-mails messages each day, and that the practice will spread beyond Wall Street.

Expletive deleted, maybe eliminating obscene e-mail is the silver bullet we’ve been waiting for.

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex.

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.