Personally, I must abmit, I’ve always been a little skeptical about corporations adopting the word “Green”.  I don’t believe many companies  truly fully adopt the “Green” term beyond the marketing department, and for basic economic reasons.  The reality is that corporations are mostly motivated by revenue generation and new “Green” technologies are expensive and an economic luxury that won’t be broadly adopted across all businesses until they really reduce costs and drive economic efficiency.

Don’t get me wrong.  I know every right-minded person cares about the environment and wants to adopt “Green” technologies.  I personnally have been looking into adding solar panels to my home;  measuring how much roof space I have, checking county permit laws, figuring out the layout of the panels, and calculating how many Kw I can generate daily if I had solar.  But then I look at the price and wham!, reality smacks me in the face.  I can’t afford it!

Fortunately, being “Green” has merged with economic reality in the world of Enterprise IT, and that merger is happening in the Cloud.

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Tags: , Appian, Appian Cloud, BPM, BPM in the Cloud, Cloud Computing

It is an inherent human trait to always strive to do things better.  Perhaps it is the roots of evolution that pushes us to continually improve both personally and professionally.   From an organizational perspective, in many ways government operates like a living organism that strives to be more efficient and more effective.

Similar to the natural evolutionary process, government agencies are often slow to adjust to a changing environment.   Its levels of checks and balances and the importance placed on consistency in constituent service, demands caution in achieving its goals.

As a result, procurement, case management, grants management, acquisition and human resources can all be mired in inefficient processes.  When this happens, government agencies can lose sight of their core goals ands missions.

From a technology perspective, government often gets weighed down by Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) systems that can be cumbersome to install and manage.  It’s ironic that once in place, the COTS systems procured on the promise of flexibility cannot effectively be changed to meet new and emerging needs.

So, is the “nature of the government beast” all about built in inefficiencies?

We believe not.  Government is on the verge of experiencing an “effectiveness revolution.” New mandates from the Obama Administration are dictating that government be more transparent, collaborative, less complex and run more cost-effectively = better!

So, with that, we are officially launching the Better Gov blog hosted by Appian.  The purpose of this blog is to chart the course of this fundamental shift in federal agency efficiency through Business Process Management (BPM).

So, strap on your boots and come along with us for a ride that will take us to the promise land, a better government.

Tags: , Appian, BPM and Human Capital, BPM for Federal Acquisitions, BPM in the Cloud, Business Process Management

In the world of technology, is there such a thing as fast enough, lean enough, or easy enough?

No.  Of course not!  We in software and technology are naturally obsessed with squeezing out a few nano-seconds in response time and trimming a few bytes off our footprint.

This obsession in Appian has led to a great new release for our customers.

Appian introduces a bevy of new architectural improvements which will dramatically reduce the footprint of the Appian environment and increases speed and performance by an order of magnitude in some cases.

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Tags: , Appian, Appian Cloud, BPM

Thanks for joining me in this series of 7 posts about The Technical Case for Case Management.  It’s been an interesting thought experiment and exciting to see the formation of what could be the next enterprise software trend or evolution of the BPM market.    I find myself asking “Will BPM evolve beyond process?”

Case Management has much promise to be that next evolution for BPM.  Case Management focuses on problems where traditional BPM has failed, such as the ad-hoc nature of many knowledge workers, Business Data Events and Business Data Reporting instead of just process, Collaboration, and working towards non-process related business goals.  But Case Management has much to learn from BPM as well, like:  Model-Driven Design techniques, Business / IT Collaboration, Discovery, and Analysis.  More »

Tags: , Appian, BPM, Case Management