The analysts at Forrester are talking about a business technology transformation they are seeing; one that they have defined as a shift from “Information Technology (IT)” to “Business Technology (BT).” On a recent webinar, VP and Research Director Connie Moore cited a move away from the traditional notion of “business & IT alignment” to a more holistic fusion of the two that will better-address 21^st Century business needs. Business process professionals are on the frontline of this BT transformation, supported by a dramatic evolution in business process management software and the strategies and methodologies behind its use. More »

Tags: , BPM, BPM in the Cloud, BPM Methodology, Business Process Management, Forrester, Lean BPM, SaaS BPM

There’s no doubt about the growing interest in consuming Business Process Management software as a service via public or private Cloud models. Yet as leading IT analysis firms have only fairly recently acknowledged on-premise BPM as a truly “mainstream” enterprise technology, organizations can’t be blamed for wondering about the maturity of BPM in the Cloud. Cutting through the noise, what’s the real substance? When will SaaS delivery of BPM reach a critical tipping point in terms of capability and acceptance?

According to research from Datamonitor, that day is fast approaching, More »

Tags: , Appian 6, Appian Anywhere, BPM, Business Process Management, Datamonitor, SaaS BPM

The analyst team at Forrester have coined a new term to define a revolution they see happening in BPM: “Process Populism.” They are talking about the increasing hue and cry from the business (process professionals and business users) demanding “greater collaboration and inclusion across all phases of the process lifecycle.” I think Forrester has nailed it. BPM is “for the business,” and increasingly, it is also “by the business.”

As usual in the emergence of a revolutionary movement, intent that has been brewing for some time is now being actualized by a catalyzing agent. More »

Tags: , Appian Anywhere, BPM in the Cloud, Forrester, SaaS BPM

There’s a lot of discussion right now about applying Lean principles to BPM initiatives – and for good reason. BPM is about removing waste across the enterprise and maximizing all facets of performance, ultimately to enhance the delivery of goods, services and support to customers. Lean is a philosophy and methodology for creating maximum value with less work, originating from the base notion that anything that doesn’t directly add customer value is wasteful. More »

Tags: , Appian 6, Appian Forum, BPM, Business Process Management, Forrester, Lean BPM

Appian Principal Consultant Glenn Smith has just published the second installment of his 2-part look at “BPM – The Next Stage of End-User Programming” on BPM.com. In Part 1, Glenn discussed the feasibility of using commercial BPM systems as a platform for end-user programming. In Part 2, he examines the value of doing so.  More »

Tags: , application development, BPM, Business Process Management, end-user programming

New research from Aberdeen Group validates what many business and IT leaders have discovered for themselves: accelerating process improvement efforts with BPM is yielding significant returns as organizations continue to grapple with the unstable global economy.

The new report, called “BPM Accelerated: Slashing Cost and Time with Agile Business Processes,” uses Aberdeen’s methodology of Best-in-Class, Industry Average and Laggard to show that leading companies were able to achieve an average 18 percent year-over-year reduction in operating cost and an average 16 percent reduction in process cycle time through a comprehensive strategy for BPM.  More »

Tags: , Aberdeen, BPM, ROI

Appian was the sole BPM vendor sponsor at the recent Gartner Symposium/ITxpo. We were there because, as I noted in a previous post, we believe that BPM technology is a powerful remedy for the competing challenges facing IT: developing and deploying new business-driving services, while also fighting the fires to maintain existing systems.

Gartner issued a press release from the show outlining the “Nine Most Contentious IT Issues for the Next Two Years.” Almost all of them are directly related to process control and improvement within IT. Whether talking about business expectations that have outstripped IT capacity, infrastructure and application modernization, or accountability and risk management, it comes down to process:  More »

Tags: , BPM, Gartner, IT

IT departments are tasked with two primary, and sometimes competing, objectives. The first, driven by executive management, is to make IT transformative to the business through new and innovative services. The second, driven by the realities of complex technology infrastructures, is to fight the daily fires and do the maintenance and upgrades required just to keep the lights on. With fewer and fewer resources available (the result of cost cutting across the organization), managers on the IT front line know they are often lucky to meet SLAs for the services already available, let alone develop, deploy and maintain new services.  More »

Tags: , Implementation