In case you missed the recent press release and notifications on Appian Forum, Appian  just released a number of major architectural improvement to the Appian platform.  This is an exciting release for customers who want to integrate and persist their data in the enterprise data repository of their choice and build process solutions that scale to massive size.

The latest Appian Tips & Tricks webinar will again feature myself and Brett Shomaker, our Group Technology Program Manager, walking through all the new features and giving a demonstration of the new data management capabilities.  Please register here or on Appian Forum if you would like to attend.

Appian Tips & Tricks webinar will be held on Thursday, September 16th, 12 PM to 1 PM EST.  Live questions will be handled during the call. 

Specifically, feature capabilities include: More »

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It’s great to see all the discussion on Case Management.  As Craig Le Clair and Connie Moore from Forrester put it last December, this truly is an Old Idea that is Catching New Fire.  Not many people would have predicted that “Case Management” would have received this much discussion 2 years ago, but the rapid convergence of social “un-structured” work with business process management has forced many people to consider new flexible solutions.

The latest post on this topic is from psHealth, a company with real experience applying Case Management solutions to the Healthcare industry.  The topic centers around “Case Management System Design Challenges”, which is a great follow-on to some previous posts on “The Technical Case for Case Management“.

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Tags: , ACM, BPM, Case Management, Forrester, Healthcare, psHealth

Please join us tomorrow, July 22nd at Noon EST for a live discussion with CEO, Matthew Calkins, Director of Product Management, Malcolm Ross, and guest speaker Matt Brook, Head of Infrastructure at Pinnacle People.  We have some exciting news to share with the Appian community on the latest growth figures for Appian, new product features around Data Management, and a great success story by Matt Brook from Pinnacle People.

Registration is open on Appian Forum for all Appian customers and partners.

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Tags: , Appian, Contest, Forum, Pinnacle People, Plug-ins, Quarterly Webinar, Smart Services

AnyDoc Software, a leading provider of automated document, data capture, and classification solutions, and Appian, the global innovator in enterprise and on-demand business process management (BPM) technology, today announced that AnyDoc will develop and deliver the next generation of document processing solutions by combining AnyDoc’s industry-leading document processing technologies with the Appian BPM platform. Through the partnership, AnyDoc will leverage Appian’s 100 percent web architecture and powerful process, task, and data orchestration to help customers automate and manage the end-to-end workflow for both structured and unstructured documents and data.

“Utilizing Appian’s powerful yet easy-to-use BPM platform within our already robust product line will help our customers achieve optimal efficiency in daily tasks, and provide management teams with the tools to view the health of their organization at the department or corporate level,” said Samuel Schrage, President of AnyDoc Software. “Capturing your business processes and decision data from the time it enters your organization, monitoring its progression, and having it available immediately at a lower cost provides companies with great advantages. Real-time status of overall business processes with a highlight on exceptions, approvals, and related activities keeps executive management responsive to the pulse of the company.”

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Calling all Appian Developers!

Appian is proud to announce the first in an ongoing series of monthly webinars highlighting Appian Tips and Tricks for Appian Developers and Process Modelers.

Each of these webinars will feature presentations, training, and sample demonstrations from the Appian Technology staff who contributed to building the feature in discussion.

In our first Tips and Tricks session, Brett Shomaker, Appian Program Manager, will explain the new Appian 6 Plug-in architecture and demonstrate the creation and deployment of an Appian 6 OSGi Smart Service.

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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: , Amazon, Appian, Appian Anywhere, BPM, BPM in the Cloud, Cloud Computing, Green, Sustainability

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 Anywhere, BPM, Business Process Management Suite

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

Welcome back to this series on The Technical Case for Case Management.  In previous posts I covered an Introduction to Case Management, Ad-Hoc Activities, Real-Time Events, Enterprise Content Management, and Collaboration.  The goal of each of these posts is to explore what technical features are required to truly have a comprehensive Case Management solution.

In this post, I’ll be exploring Reporting and Analysis in the context of Case Management.

Coming from a BPM perspective, let’s first see how well typical BPM reporting and analysis capabilities can satisfy Case Management requirements.

BPM reporting and analysis tools often make the assumption that the goal in analysis is to reduce processing times and increase efficiency.  BPMS platforms provide tools like bottleneck analysis, simulation, and Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), which all drive to this typical goal in analyzing process and activity performance, removing inefficiencies, and streamlining processes.

Case Management goals though are not as predefined as BPM.  The goals in Case Management are often not directly related to process efficiency or activity performance.  Case Management often drives towards specific business goals that may or may not entail process efficiency.  For example, Case Management goals might be:  ”Increase revenue per client”; “Increase customer satisfaction”; “Reduce risk”, etc.. More »

Tags: , Analysis, Appian, Appian Anywhere, BPM, Case Management, psHealth, Reporting, Simulation

Only a few posts left on the topic of “The Technical Case for Case Management”.  If you are catching up – refer to my previous posts (Part1, Part2, Part3, Part4).  During this series I’m exploring thoughts around exactly what is Case Management and what technical features are really required to have a complete Case Management solution.

In this post, I’ll be exploring the role of Collaboration and Enterprise 2.0 in the context of Case Management.  I’ve been looking forward to discussing this topic.  Collaboration and Social Media are hot topics right now and I believe many organizations are still trying to understand how to apply consumer style collaboration (Twitter, Facebook, etc..) in the context of their organization. More »

Tags: , Appian, BPM, Case Management, Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Social