Breaking news today that Federal CIO Vivek Kundra is leaving the White House. Kundra was originally appointed to overhaul the Federal Government’s use of information technology. According to Politico, in the past two-and-a-half years he has overseen $80 billion in federal IT projects. The point of those projects, and Kundra’s strong endorsement of cloud computing for the government, we’re crystalized in his 25 Point Implementation Plan to Reform Federal Information Technology Management, announced in December 2010. The question now is: will that reform plan continue to move forward?

While I certainly hope so, I believe agencies have a responsibility to achieve the objectives of the plan regardless of any White House mandate. BPM software provides the means to do so.

More »

Tags: , Appian Cloud, BPM for Federal Acquisitions, BPM for Government, BPM in the Cloud, Government 2.0, Government and Efficiency

Here’s some great news to start the year: we want to congratulate UPS for winning KMWorld Magazine’s 2010 KM Reality Award! The award recognizes an organization demonstrating leadership in the implementation of knowledge management practices and processes by realizing measurable business benefits. UPS uses Appian in support of a mandate from the company’s CIO to deliver better, faster service at reduced cost.

More »

Tags: , Appian, application development, BPM, Business Process Management, UPS

How often do you hear a high-level government executive discuss Star Trek, future technologies and the need for IT to be about decision making in the same breath?  Or hear a CEO discuss how process automation has trumped the slide rule as the necessary technology to get us to Mars?

These are all concepts to reinforce the value of process improvement for government, and how it drives overall effectiveness.  Essentially, Business Process Management (BPM) is becoming a ‘must have’ technology for government.

Check out the last installment of our video series from the “Hottest IT Trends in Diplomacy and Defense” event hosted by Bisnow from last week.  Once again, we feature clips of Keith Seaman, Acting Director, Defense Business Systems Acquisition Executive (DBSAE) Business Transformation Agency (BTA), and Matthew Calkins, CEO of Appian.  Except this time, we are showcasing a bit of a sci-fi twist.

Tags: , BPM for Federal Acquisitions, Business Process Management

The age-old expression “fortune favors the bold” means that Fortuna, the Goddess of Luck, is more likely to help those who take risks or action. And, to further reinforce this, it is the motto of the U.S. 3rd Marine Regiment. To us, this particular quote resonates very well in the world of Business Process Management (BPM) and government. Why? Because BPM is all about action. And we have a story about “BPM in Action” that would certainly apply with any government sector.

For many years, it was common knowledge that our Armed Forces, and the Intelligence Community for that matter, grappled with internal information sharing and collaboration issues. The U.S. Army essentially lacked a central hub for information dissemination, knowledge sharing, and collaboration to support among the more than 2.4 million active soldiers, reserve members and civil employees. In addition, geographically dispersed and disconnected computer systems severely limited its collaboration capabilities.

Here’s where BPM comes into play. The U.S. Army created Army Knowledge Online (AKO), which was based on Appian’s leading-edge BPM solution technology that enables the streamlining of enterprise collaboration and facilitation of knowledge management. Launched after only three-and-a-half months and on budget, the AKO — the largest intranet in the world with more than two million users — provides a unique community-oriented approach to building structured professional forums, driving successful enterprise knowledge management. In addition, check out this Congressional Report that highlights how AKO saves the U.S Army more than $500 million annually.

On top of that, the U.S. Army extended its use of Appian’s enterprise portal technology, business process management solutions and underlying process-based services to develop of Defense Knowledge Online (DKO), which is a single enterprise service portal, serving as the entry point for all U.S. Department of Defense (DoD).

Clearly Fortuna is shining her light on the U.S. Army. Its use of BPM is ripe case study for action translating into fortune. And, the fortune that the Army reaped is in the form of being more effective through better collaboration.

Tags: , Army Knowledge Online, BPM and Human Capital, BPM for Federal Acquisitions, Case Management, Process Improvement for Government

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.

More »

Tags:

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.

More »

Tags: , Appian, Appian Cloud, BPM

The past 6 months have been some of the most exciting times for Appian on all fronts, from dramatic market consolidation, to amazing customer growth for Appian.  It seems this cycle of success for Appian really kicked off with the release of Appian’s most powerful BPM platform yet, Appian 6.  Appian 6 has dramatically accelerated the speed customers can deploy and manage their BPM applications and improve their enterprise processes.  With innovative features like fit-for-purpose BPM dashboards and one-click deployment of BPM applications, customers who have migrated from Appian 5 to Appian 6 have raved about the benefits and accelerated process improvement they have received after upgrading.

After Appian 6 was released, Appian committed itself to change the way we delivered software.  As our SaaS business has grown, Appian has changed to the development methodology of a SaaS company.  This means, rapid releases, effortless upgrades, and a continuous stream of new features being introduced into the platform.  The pace of innovation at Appian has tripled since the release of Appian 6 and the features in our pipeline are guaranteed to shake-up the BPM market.  As other BPM vendors are looking to cash out and leave their customers holding the bag, Appian is “throwing down the gauntlet” to the competition, challenging them to match Appian in innovation and customer success.

With that note, Appian has made available the latest version of Appian 6 for download from Appian Forum.  Appian Anywhere customers using the Appian SaaS service will be upgraded automatically to the latest version of Appian. More »

Tags: , Appian 6, Appian Cloud, Appian Forum, BPM, Business Process Management, SaaS BPM

I had another chance to speak with Enterprise Technology Management (ETM) in a roundtable podcast hosted by Dana Gardner from Interarbor Solutions and a couple other BPM vendors.   Topics in this roundtable discussion included different perspectives on current and future trends in Business Process Management, the evolving role of IT over the next decade, and modern day SOA best practices. 

As usual, ETM does a great job selecting topics that are meaningful to today’s IT professionals and gathering insights from experts across the industry.  You can click on the podcast link and register to download and listen to this informative roundtable discussion.

Malcolm Ross

Director Product Management

Tags: , Agile, Appian, BPM, Business Process Management, Collaboration, ETM, IT, podcast, SOA

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