The Bank of Tennessee (BoT) is a community bank in northeast Tennessee. It’s a smaller bank, so they compete and win on service and the customer experience. Will Barrett, a self-proclaimed technology “geek”, talked about BoT’s unique competitive position. Like other community banks, they face increased competition from larger financial institutions with much larger technology budgets. Second, people aren’t going into banks anymore — banks have to proactively adapt to customer demands or fade into obscurity. Third, complex financial rules are growing daily and the burden of compliance is heavy.

The BoT’s strategy is to focus on the customer experience. Experience can be broken down into two broad categories: Internal deals with operational and process components such as time, cost and accuracy; External is focused on channels and interactions, the physical end-user experience. Barrett focused on how Appian’s mobile and social features improves internal operations to enhance the customer experience.

How can financial services deploy mobile and social? Barrett says there’s a lot of uncertainty in the industry on how best to execute these powerful concepts. Mobile is the killer app — with the consumerization and proliferation of smartphones and tablets, most executives and sales staff are armed with these devices. However, in the Enterprise, functionality hasn’t evolved as quickly as the technology. Barrett states that organizations need to leverage current mobile technology into value-added work that goes beyond email.

The mortgage process was one of BoT’s first initiatives in using Appian. It was a manual, paper-based process with too many exception paths, limited process visibility and audit trails, and bottlenecks waiting on manual routing. One error could trigger a 50%+ increase in the process time! The process was a communications trainwreck. In Barrett’s experience, most high profile issues are due to a lack of communication. Enter worksocial, and a focus on mobility and social collaboration.

Mobile in the Mortgage Process
BoT didn’t have to reinvent the wheel to use mobile — they could leverage existing systems and processes. Loan officers are able to take mortgage applications on an iPad, which provides process visibility and interactions no matter where they are. Decision makers are mobilized, and able to put the focus on the customer, which results in a better customer experience.

Less focus on process + More focus on customer = Better customer experience

Social in the Mortgage Process
Social is all about collaboration. It brings together lenders, underwriters, approvers, and processors into one platform. Appian provides a unified communication channel that ties together desktop and mobile users while providing the necessary audit trail. This dramatically increased adoption and employee enthusiasm, while decreasing training times.

Business Value Delivered

• 30% faster to complete the mortgage process
• Full process visibility
• Increased data quality
• Less re-work
• Decreased training time
• Better/easier customer experience

Barrett closed out the presentation with a look at BoT’s roadmap for the future. They want to add iterative enhancements to the current mortgage process, with lightweight additions and new integrations such as imaging. Next, they’ll expand BPM across the organization, with a consumer and commercial loan process, and a customer profitability tool. The future is bright for the Bank of Tennessee and their customers!

Alena Callaghan

The same general approach also applies when evaluating multi-million dollar software investments that you hope will be the backbone of your operations for the next 10 or 15 years.  But the factors for consideration are very different in technology-based purchases.  It’s imperative to get this process right if you want to have a system that fits your needs, provides the highest benefit, and has the lowest lifecycle cost of ownership.  There are two common mistake areas in TCO analysis that everyone should note and avoid.

Mistake #1 – Using Only Hard Cost Input Numbers

A TCO model for a large software purchase almost always ends with an Excel spreadsheet comparing well-crunched numbers side by side.  With that end in mind, buyers set off with a focus on hard numbers they can enter into their models.  The first mistake they make is limiting their scope to upfront cost, annual maintenance, and expected upgrade purchase costs from the vendor.

This is a mistake because it leaves so much out of the picture.  For starters, how well does the software package fit the needs of the intended users?  If it is commercial off-the-shelf, how easily can it be adjusted to meet new requirements?  Software that enables faster work, more collaboration, and better management visibility can have a dramatic impact on a company’s bottom line, yielding benefits that are often many multiples of the software’s costs.  Choosing a software application because its costs are easier to define and appear lower without regards to fit can lead to fiasco.

Evaluating how software can make an organization more effective can be straight forward in some cases (e.g. new production management software that increases daily output by 10%).  But it is frequently not a hard number exercise.  Compare two software packages, one that follows traditional design and  keeps project information within a department vs. another that has built-in social communication around process events that can break down silos.  How much more productive would your organization be if decision times could be cut in half (like CME Group experienced)?  What’s the value of the competitive advantage that would create?  While specific numbers may be hard to generate, these benefits have to be included in an evaluation.  Forward thinking business and government leaders are driving their organizations to think this way.

Mistake #2 – Not Planning Ahead for Unexpected Change 

One of the things I love about financial analysis in Excel is that everything lines up neatly.  The sense of order that comes from seeing factors displayed and calculated builds comfort and satisfaction.  But often this is a false sense of comfort.  Reality is full of disruptions and unplanned events.  It’s hard to fit those neatly into rows, columns, and cells so analysts tend to ignore them to the organization’s peril.  The longer the time horizon for analysis, the greater the impact this mistake has.

While working as a business strategy consultant in the early 1990’s, I distinctly remember a colleague telling me he just heard about this thing called the “world wide web.”  Talk about a disruption!  Any financial model I created for a client at that time that went out more than five years was flawed because it didn’t account for the explosive growth of the internet.  The same is true for any financial analysis built within the past five years that didn’t account for the explosive growth of mobile communication and social networks.

How do you incorporate unplanned events into your TCO model?  History teaches us that disruptive events in your business will happen.  You will either incur the costs to adapt your software or incur the organizational costs of not having software that meets your needs.  (It’s not pretty when organizations find their software isn’t flexible.  It spawns manual processes outside of the application which has a negative impact on every type of metric.)  Recognize that your software will have to be adapted to meet new conditions.  The longer the planning horizon, the more adaptations you’ll require.  Ask these questions – Can this particular software be adapted?  By whom?  At what cost?  Probe to get example costs for changes that seem easy as well as ones involving core logic changes.

The Right Way to Build a TCO Model

Here’s what a TCO model that avoids these mistakes and accounts for all costs and benefits looks like:

Application start-up costs:

• Software licenses expense – be sure to estimate any overage charge if the license isn’t a per-user model
• Server and infrastructure costs – required only if the application is not in the cloud
• Required customization to meet initial needs – this is easy to scope as part of an evaluation process (but you must account for a shortened application lifecycle if customizations prevent upgrades to the base product)
• Professional services for installation – just to get the software functional in your environment
• Cost of training users – this can be high if the application logic doesn’t match your organization’s work logic
• Costs to enable users if access requires anything other than a standard web browser (e.g. a thin client on the desktop)

On-going application support costs

• Annual software maintenance costs to the vendor
• Internal costs of supporting the application
• Expected costs of full vendor upgrades to get enhanced functionality (usually every 2-3 years)

Costs of adapting the software to meet changed conditions

• Who can adapt the application – you the client, a class of third-party developers, or only the software vendor?
• Expected frequency of changes – both minor (e.g. workflow, input variables) and major (changes to core logic)
• Expected cost per change (be sure to ask vendors for rough orders of magnitude for a range of changes)

Organizational Benefits

• Improved productivity of direct users (e.g. 20% more transactions processed per day)
• Better insights for management through easily tailored reporting
• Built-in mobile apps to allow process participation from mobile devices (iOS, Android, Blackberry)
• Improved communication and decision making across departmental boundaries (only applies if the application has built-in social collaboration around process event feeds)
• Speeding of information and decisions across departmental boundaries
• Improved management control

There’s one more factor that defies quantification for a TCO, but experienced managers find a way to account for in the process.   That’s the trajectory of the vendor behind the software application.  If your planning cycle requires you to view this purchase as a 10-15 year investment, then part of your purchase is a bet on the vendor’s continued innovation and expansion of the core application.  Be sure to find a way to account for this in your analysis.

Failed IT investments are common news in the business press.  The Federal government has had several that recently gained a lot of publicity.  There are usually many factors that account for big scope, long term projects getting derailed.  The seeds of failure are often planted early.  A complete and proper TCO analysis can help avoid these early sources of project failure.

Evan McDonnell

At the conference you’ll hear BPM visions and predictions from a variety of industry experts (Gartner, Forrester, Kemsley Design, MWD Advisors, Michael zur Muehlen). You’ll also get all sorts of product insights and tips (and yes, free training) from Appian experts. But beyond all of that, the best reason for a BPM professional to attend Appian World is to hear success stories, lessons-learned and best-practices from other in-the-trenches BPM professionals.

The Appian World 2012 agenda is jam-packed with end-user case studies and panel discussions demonstrating how Mobile, Cloud and Social BPM are driving user adoption, creating intelligent processes, and delivering transformative enterprise value.

Government and commercial organization presenters include:

• European Bank for Reconstruction & Development: Richard Pomeroy & Alexey Palagin will discuss creating an Operational Business Management system with BPM
• Dept. of Veterans Affairs: Chanel Bankston-Carter of VA and Jason Adolf of Serco will outline how innovative BPM capabilities enable the “VA for Vets” career support program
• CME Group: John Verburgt will share how the world’s leading derivatives marketplace started fast with Cloud BPM and rapidly scaled an Enterprise BPM program on-premise
• EDP Renewables: Jaimeet Gulati will explain how modern BPM software helps the green energy provider stay competitive and keep the megawatts flowing
• Benenden Healthcare Society: Nicholas Thrustle & Tim Clarke will discuss delivering Self-Service Adaptive Case Management for more than one million members
• Archant: Nick Schiller & Duncan MacDonald will talk about how the U.K. publisher is transforming customer engagement through BPM software
• Archstone: David Carpenter will discuss how the high-end apartment operations leader is evolving its long-standing BPM program for a mobile and social future
• Panel participation from SNL Financial, Manulife Financial, U.S. Courts, U.S Marine Corps, and others

Our discount-rate room block at the Reston Hyatt is filling up fast, as are the slots for our free Appian training sessions.

Mark your calendar and register today!

Ben Farrell

The event is dedicated to helping financial firms take that next step forward in defining and automating processes across the organization. This premier gathering for the financial services industry (banking, insurance, and capital markets) brings together industry experts, senior decision-makers, and thought leaders to share their insights and best practices in an environment that encourages participant interaction and networking.

Malcolm Ross, our Director of Product Management, will deliver a Thought Leadership session on “Business Agility through Social and Mobile BPM.” Social BPM has the potential to significantly streamline processes, and for a generation raised on near real-time communication tools such as Facebook, the ability to easily collaborate with others inside the organization as well as external partners is an intuitive way to work. Mobile BPM is a key requirement for getting financial services executives and field personnel to participate in process, making better decisions and keeping business moving based on real-time, actionable data.

Our customer AGF Trust will also be on the agenda. John Jarrett, AGF Trust Director of BPM, will participate in an Industry Leaders Perspective panel on “Best Practices for Getting BPM Right the First Time.” The discussion will focus on deriving the most value from BPM investments. John is a veteran BPM practitioner leading a high-value BPM program that touches all of the company’s major product lines across multiple departments.

For more information on BPM for financial services, read our white paper on “Transforming the Financial Customer Experience with BPM Software.”

Hope to see you in New York!

- Ben Farrell, Director, Corporate Communications

Crawford is a long-time Appian customer, first using our BPM software to drive the creation of repairNet, the Company’s managed repair service in the U.K. Based on the success of that first project, Crawford acquired Appian for global deployment to radically alter the way the Company develops software applications.

In the words of Crawford Global Chief Information Officer Brian Flynn, “The Appian BPM Suite, with its mobile and social capabilities, is truly an enabler that will change the way we work with our business partners and ultimately how we service our clients.”

This is the kind of innovative thinking that secured Crawford’s highest IW 500 placement to-date. In the past three years, Crawford has developed a global systems roadmap that unifies BPM, applications and data into a standard global enterprise portal. In conjunction with that plan, the Company has increased investments in advanced technology to help feed the growing appetite among insurers and self-insured businesses for data that helps them manage risks and reduce costs.

Congratulations as well to a number of other Appian customers whose innovation leadership was rewarded with recognition on this year’s list,  including UPS, Raytheon, CME Group and Ameren.

-Ben Farrell, Director, Corporate Communications

Mr. Hughes discussed how Appian allows financial firms to deliver innovative capabilities cost-effectively to any desktop or mobile device, and why FSIs should consider new BPM delivery methods.

In the video, Mr. Hughes describes BPM as one of the most dynamic and fastest-growing sectors in all of enterprise software. Proof of BPM’s maturity comes in its focus on the three areas that are re-defining IT: cloud delivery, enterprise mobility and social collaboration.

Mr. Hughes echoed analyst predictions that cloud will become the dominant platform for application delivery in the next 5-10 years. For FSIs, he said, the reduced total cost of ownership and continued enhancements to cloud platforms is driving a move to the cloud for mission-critical applications.

As regards enterprise mobility within financial services,  Mr. Hughes cited increasing pressure from employees and customers to move business application functionality to mobile devices. Industries such as financial services that have a broad and distributed field force are among the first to understand the service delivery and operational effectiveness benefits of mobile BPM.

While he made the point that mobility and social collaboration are different, the two can be linked. Social technologies can unlock the hidden intelligence in an FSI, generating more agility and innovative solutions to customer and operations issues. But the Facebook-style exchanges we are all used to only take on business value when they are anchored in business events and outcomes. Social BPM ties underlying business processes and applications to a collaborative interface. Putting that interface on a mobile device means new ways to run processes, handle cases, access real-time data, and respond to market changes.

Mr. Hughes also shared a few BPM best practices for FSIs. Remember, he said, that BPM is a transformational technology, so effective change management is a must to ensure adoption, use and success. When starting out, looking for the right type of first project: one that is strategic enough to deliver real value, but that can be rolled out rapidly enough to maintain executive attention and sponsorship.

Watch the video to hear more.

-Ben Farrell, Director, Corporate Communications

And guess what? Our mobile BPM just got even better.

Today we announced significant enhancements that make it even easier for organizations to tap the full power of enterprise mobility. A big one is Mobile Image and Document Capture. Let’s say you’ve got a burst pipe at your house. There’s water damage, and repairs that need to be made, and you want your insurance company to cover it. With Appian, you can now snap a couple photos, submit them through your company’s Appian mobile BPM app, and have them flow directly into a claim process, including any required web forms. No waiting for the insurance adjuster to come to your house, fill out paperwork, go back to office and input it into back-end systems and then wait for a response. On the flip-side, an adjuster armed with mobile BPM can do the same when on-site evaluating a claim or inspecting completed repairs.

Or maybe you work for an energy company, and your job is facilities inspection. When you encounter an issue, it’s the same deal. Snap a photo, which is automatically fed into your enterprise maintenance process.

The new possibilities for improving claims, customer service, healthcare delivery and many types of dynamic case management, and more are virtually unlimited.

Another area we have enhanced is Mobile Security. Mobile apps delivered on the Appian BPM Suite ensure safe and secure mobile participation in critical business processes. Appian’s mobile BPM features secure network communication and authentication, encrypted local data storage, and remote account disablement in the event of a lost or stolen device. Read our Mobile Security white paper for more about this important topic.

Just one more example of making mobile work for business: we now offer Private-Label Branding. Appian provides private-labeled distributions of the native client applications in the public application stores for each mobile platform, or through private distribution to enterprise devices. Appian’s private-labeled versions provide all the same features to access enterprise business processes, with a user experience that is entirely branded to the customer or partner organization.

Innovative. Safe and secure. Driving value for your organization and its brand. That’s what Appian’s mobile BPM is all about. Contact us to learn more about how we can mobile-enable your enterprise processes and applications.

Ben Farrell, Director, Corporate Communications

Process improvement is crucial for FSIs. These organizations have processes that are highly-complex, that deal with personal financial data that must be secured, that are subject to strict and constantly-evolving regulation – and that must appear simple and seamless to customers across a range of communication channels. Appian’s BPM software and pre-built solutions help FSIs modernize their infrastructure for greater flexibility and increased control. The up-shot is a better ability to take advantage of new growth opportunities (through enhanced customer intimacy, visibility into up-sell/cross-sell opportunities, faster introduction of new products and services to market, etc.) and more agility to deal with on-going regulatory challenges and evolving customer expectations.

To get a better sense of why FSO gave us their industry award, download our white paper on “Driving Financial Organization Transformation through Business Process Management.”

-Ben Farrell, Director, Corporate Communications

Earlier this year, the General Services Administration announced it will cut funding to over a dozen regional telework centers. The remaining telework centers will operate under a private sector model. This move seems to be at odds with the 2010 Telework Enhancement Act, which expands telework opportunities for federal employees. While the legislation encourages federal agencies to create telework opportunities for employees, it did not provide funding for telework centers.

The telecenters are intended to offer a workplace close to people’s homes, thereby reducing commuting times and costs. Business process management software gets around the apparent contradiction in government’s telework policy, creating affordable solutions for collaboration and organizational efficiency.

BPM software could improve the manageability and performance of the work done in those centers, while reducing the overall cost of their operation. More excitingly, using mobile BPM with inherent high security could eliminate the necessity and cost of those centers entirely. When federal employees can not only see, but also take business action, directly from their iPad/iPhone/Blackberry/Android devices, with all required data protection and access privileges, government agencies can move towards supporting true remote workers.

Appian’s BPM platform embraces the administration’s focus on reducing cost while enhancing performance through mobility and cloud computing. The result is better collaboration within agencies. The capability to create templates for repeatable processes also can be shared among agencies, enabling better operating efficiencies across government – improving service to all citizens.

According to some reports, only about five percent of the federal workforce telework on any level; the goal is to increase that number. Appian provides a low-cost way to simultaneously increase that percentage while also delivering better overall federal business practices.

-Ben Farrell, Director, Corporate Communications

Edward Hughes, our VP of Worldwide Sales, participated in a panel discussion on “Driving Process Excellence Through Innovative Platforms and Solutions.” He outlined the three crucial elements that FSIs must focus on to achieve business transformation: business and IT collaboration, customer service excellence, and hitting the ever-moving target of regulatory compliance.

The IT infrastructure of tomorrow’s leading financial firms will achieve these goals by:

• Automating how people and technology come together
• Allowing an organization to move more quickly while delivering higher quality services
• Bringing technology to the user (both internal employees and external customers) in an intuitive and easy-to-use manner
• Providing the visibility, governance and control required by regulators

He also outlined the three major inflection points for financial firm IT today:

• Cloud computing – because in the world of FSIs, outsourcing is inevitable
• Mobility – because it enables a new paradigm that is dynamic and user-driven, not static and organizationally dictated
• Social technologies – because they will enable FSIs to unlock the latent intelligence in their organizations held by their knowledge workers

Appian’s business process management software, with its innovation leadership in Mobile BPM, Cloud BPM and Social BPM, is the ideal platform for FSIs to tap the business value of these IT trends. Mr. Hughes went on to illustrate how global financial organizations like CME Group, Clayton Holdings, Edward Jones Trust Company and others have used Appian to meet their business transformation objectives.

We will also be at the June FSOkx event in New York, and we’d love to see you there. In the meantime, read our white paper on “Driving Financial Organization Transformation Through Business Process Management” for more information.

-Ben Farrell, Director, Corporate Communications