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 »

Tags:

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.

More »

Tags:

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.

More »

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.

More »

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

Chris Dorobek of Federal News Radio recently interviewed Appian VP of Marketing Samir Gulati about the increased use of business process management software in federal agencies, and the financial and operational benefits of using BPM in a cloud environment.

In the past, federal agencies have created “point-solution” BPM applications for proof of concept, Gulati said. Now, these organizations are using the technology as a broader platform agency-wide for process and case management. The FDA is implementing BPM for everything from CIO-level reporting to tracking new medicines and food additives. Another example, recently discussed in this blog and in Washington Technology, is the Treasury Department’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which has multiple mission-critical BPM projects in place.

BPM in the cloud is also taking off in government circles, Gulati added. The Department of Education recently granted Appian an Authority to Operate a hosted BPM application delivered through Amazon Web Services. Cloud benefits include a greatly reduced total cost of ownership, and faster time to value, he said. Agencies don’t have to install equipment on premises, software is readily hosted and accessed through the cloud, there is no need to deploy servers or maintain applications, and upgrades are received free without the need for involvement from agency personnel.

 When using BPM in the federal sector, Gulati added, agencies have to iterate and constantly improve processes in response to the changing regulatory landscape. Rules and regulations must be built into processes to comply with changing compliance requirements in the federal marketplace.

 “Great processes are evolved, not invented,” Gulati noted.

Tags: , Amazon Web Services, Appian, BPM for Case Management, BPM in the Cloud, BPM software, Business Process Management, Business Process Management and Government, Case Management, Cloud Computing, FDA, Government 2.0, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Process Improvement for Government, Process Management, software-as-a-service

As the US economy continues to dig itself out of the recession, banking reforms and financial accountability top the list of priorities. In November, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) brought business process management to its core mission of financial regulation with the planned introduction of the BPM-based Central Application Tracking System (CATS). That’s just one of two critical functions the agency has turned over to BPM software.

The OCC oversees national banking laws for the U.S. Department of Treasury, and establishes rules and regulations governing the banking operations.

CATS will be essential to the OCC’s automated submission and processing of paper-based licensing and regulatory filings for U.S. commercial banks. The system will manage the licensing and chartering of all U.S. federal banks going forward, for the continued stability and security of the nation’s financial system.

Equally importantly, OCC’s use of BPM software sidesteps a fundamental limitation of commercial off the shelf software applications – namely, an inability to transfer to other business problems than those for which they were licensed.  With the Appian BPM Suite, OCC is not only addressing regulatory guidelines, it is also ensuring physical security at the agency.

The BPM-based Personnel Administration and Security System (PASS) is a new enterprise system under development by OCC to automate on-boarding, off-boarding and security processing for all agency employees and contractors. BPM software is being used to create the system – an important example of how an agency can use a single license for multiple essential operating functions.

The news from OCC is continued evidence that high-profile federal agencies are turning to BPM to transform agency operations and performance of core functions critical to agency success. And in today’s economy, what’s more critical than the integrity of our financial system?

Tags: , Appian, BPM software, Business Process Management, Business Process Management and Government, COTS, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Process Improvement for Government