I wish I could say “By the way, don’t forget about our Appian World 2012 Post-Conference Training Seminars”, but apparently many of our registrations have already remembered.

So far, 60% of registrations have signed up for our Wednesday April 18th training sessions.  This was more than we had planned, but we will be sure to prep the training rooms and be prepared to handle the expected large audiences for the 4th day of Appian World 2012.

The Appian World 2012′s Post-Conference Training event is open to all conference attendees and will feature top Appian experts covering some of the hottest topics in our user community.  Each session will run for 3 hours and provide in-depth discussions and guidelines for tackling some of the advanced aspects of the Appian BPM Suite. More »

Tags: , Appian World 2012, Training

Here at Appian, we are gearing up for our biggest global user conference yet.  This is the 4th Appian World conference, and the first to feature a multiple tracks that cater to the diverse and growing audience expected to attend this April.

For Appian World 2012, we will be featuring a BPM Beginner, Appian Developer, and Business track featuring.  Each track will feature a variety of customer case studies, 3rd party analyst / BPM expert perspectives, and learning sessions to ensure success in your BPM endeavors. More »

Tags: , Appian World, Appian World 2012

Appian has scheduled our next Appian Tips and Tricks webinar for October 27th at Noon EST, 5 PM BST.  During this webinar Appian will be introducing our new Reference App

Appian already provides a large set of reference apps covering HR On-boarding and Security Processing, Federal Procurement and a host of process areas in Financial Services, Insurance, Healthcare and other industries. The new Appian Reference App provides a “guided tour” for building applications from specifications to design to final product, capitalizing on Appian’s best-practice delivery methodology and incorporating Appian’s latest Mobile BPM and Social BPM capabilities. It will be continuously upgraded in step with all future enhancements to Appian functionality. More »

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It’s always great to see Appian software being used to support a great cause.  The latest implementation of Appian in this direction will be at the National Council for Family Affairs in Jordan to support a case management solution for tracking domestic violence cases in Jordan.  This is a important initiative for the Queen of Jordan to ensure a better life for the families of Jordan.

A few days ago, His Majesty King Abdullah II and Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah personally met with the Board of Trustees of the National Council for Family Affairs regarding the initiative and to review a presentation of the Appian software prepared by Mohammad Abusinnah (Appian’s Program Manager for the Middle East) and software engineers from SSS Process, a subsidiary of SSS IT, Appian’s strategic business partner in KSA and Jordan.  The image below is of His and Her Majesty at the review meeting.

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Jim Collin’s classic book “Good to Great” is a study of eleven Fortune 500 companies that vastly outperformed their peers over an extended period of time.  This seminal work distills the handful of factors that account for these companies outstanding success.  I re-read the book on vacation and it gave me the idea to analyze the success of Appian’s shared services clients to understand what differentiated the “great” implementations from the merely “good” ones.

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Tags: , business process outsourcing, Financial Operations, shared services

Tags: , Cloud, IT Management

What do these three things have in common? I need to set the stage appropriately before I explain.

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Tags: , Appian, BPM, BPM software, Business Process Management

Part Two of a Four-Part Series (see Part One)

One of the most often discussed problems facing the federal government is the graying of the workforce. As more senior employees look to retirement, what can be done to fill the knowledge gap created by their departure?

Strengthening program management is one of the underlying themes behind the OMB’s recent 25-point plan to improve federal IT, announced in December 2010. According to the plan, this requires (among other things) a best practices collaboration platform to help even the newest IT managers make better decisions.

This is an ideal application of BPM software. Procedures and institutional knowledge are often only retained in the memories of long-time workers. Finding out what these people do today (i.e., modeling their processes) is crucial. That visibility enables process improvements to be implemented. Standardizing the execution of those oprimized processes is crucial for getting new employees up to speed and productive quickly. Codifing optimized processes, driven by business rules, creates a standardized documented system that can be understood and practiced by the next generation of workers.

Beyond workforce enablement and career development, the benefits of business process management in developing a best practices collaboration platform are obvious. Consider the Customs Border Patrol (CBP), which is using BPM to manage and monitor the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI) project. The WHTI project encompasses multiple methods for identifying travelers and assessing potential security threats at the US borders. BPM technology gave WHTI the active project management, process visibility, documentation audit trails, and collaboration capabilities needed to efficienctly manage concurrent development and deployment across 63 distinct sites.

Collaborative best practices also offer tangible benefits to the mission-critical functions within agencies where the next generation of IT program managers are plying their trade.

In our next blog, we’ll look at how BPM helps implement another important aspect of the OMB’s overhaul of federal IT – namely, aligning the acquisition process with the technology cycle.

Tags: , BPM for Program Management, BPM software, Business Process Management, Business Process Management and Government, Government 2.0, Government and Efficiency, OMB

[Part One of a Four-Part Series]

The Fed’s latest guidelines for improving IT in the public sector virtually scream out for the application of Business Process Management.

In December 2010, the Office of Management and Budget announced a 25-point plan to restructure federal IT. The 25 points are based on five broad changes to agency IT, first outlined by OMB in November. Jeffrey Zients, the federal chief performance officer, said the plan should help remove barriers that get in the way of successful project management and execution.

Not surprisingly, nearly all of OMB’s broad changes can be made easier to by adopting BPM solutions.

In our next several blog entries, we’ll look at some of these plan points and look at the role that BPM can play in bringing about the changes that OMB wants. Today, let’s look at the notion of “applying light technology shared solutions.”

The point of shared services in government is to optimize data center capability among agencies through collaboration rather than new technology purchases – while also adopting a “cloud first” policy for new technology.

The continued focus on cloud computing is laudable. Organizations like the Department of Education, which is starting to use Amazon Web Services for some of its new initiatives, are already showing their understanding of how to put a “cloud-first” mandate into action.

At the heart of OMB’s shared services model is a need for better-detailed process. If one agency needs more computing space and the other has it, we’re not just talking about computing space, we’re talking about the process of understanding when your agency has excess capacity, and the process of making other agencies aware of that available capacity. That type of process can be turned into a template and shared across agencies.

Communities of interest have sprung up around BPM to provide just such “templatized” processes. For example, the Appian Forum online community provides application templates and components developed by Appian, its customers and partners. These templates all can be shared, hot deploying an application for any solution. That’s real knowledge sharing and collaboration across and between organizations.

Improved collaboration within and across agencies will get the Fed closer to OMB’s goal of shared services. When processes can be standardized not just for agency specific functions but at the edges as well, sharing that information leads to better sharing of computing capacity, too.

In our next blog, we’ll look at OMB’s goal of “strengthening program management” and how BPM fits in.

Tags: , Appian, BPM for Program Management, BPM in the Cloud, BPM software, Business Process Management, Cloud Computing, Government 2.0, Government and Efficiency, OMB, Open Government, Process Improvement for Government, software-as-a-service

With a telework law ever closer to reality in the federal government, the need for reliable (and mobile) business process management has never been more critical – both in planning and in day-to-day work.

Even in a lame duck session of Congress, the need for federal telework legislation could not be disputed. After having been approved by the Senate in September, the Telework Enhancement Act (HR 1722) was passed by the House of Representative this month by a margin of 254-152, according to an article in The Federal Times. Observers are urging President Obama to quickly sign the bill into law.

Many supporters of telework point to both cost reductions and improved productivity as key benefits. Creating a telework component in day-to-day employee personnel policy will require a hard look at current business processes to ensure both of those benefits are met. That’s where BPM software comes in.

It’s generally accepted that BPM improves productivity, by providing visibility across organizations and finding opportunities to improve operations. In the planning phase for compliance with telework regulation, BPM will be essential in determining whether bottlenecks might develop, and how to address potential problems arising from a dispersed workforce.

Once the plans have been set, BPM will become critical for the teleworking employees. It’s important for employees to be part of the process of doing business, whether at the office, home office or in transit. A completely mobile BPM solution will help make telework a completely transparent way for federal agencies to do business.

The months to come will involve a lot of upfront work to ensure a smooth transition process when telework almost inevitably becomes law. Agencies with experience in BPM now will have a leg up in compliance later. Let the planning begin!

Tags: , BPM in the Cloud, BPM software, Business Process Management, Business Process Management and Government, Cloud Computing, Government 2.0, mobile BPM, software-as-a-service, Telework