Yelp. Twitter. Amazon Reviews. Google Local. It’s easier than ever for customers to share their experiences with brands — good or bad — and one negative comment is often worth ten positive comments. It’s clear that customer engagement has become a major differentiator for businesses in the 21st Century. In the age of social and mobile, when everyone is ready to broadcast their opinions to the world, how can your business ensure a positive customer experience? The business processes that govern how a company operates at every level are what ultimately determine customer satisfaction and loyalty. Social and mobile computing are the ticket to modernizing these business processes and driving growth.

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Tags: , kmworld, mobile BPM, Social BPM, Webinar

The Social Business Software (SBS) industry has come to a fork in the road.  All the cool features, collaborations, discussions, and status updates have reached their day of reckoning.  Chief executives are looking at their multi-million dollar technology investments in social business software and asking “What value is this bringing to my enterprise?”.

Unfortunately, the SBS industry is struggling to give a good answer.  Jive is claiming to have the best answer, proudly declaring that Jive customers achieve a 2-4% increase in revenue. This statement though reminds me of the Simpsons episode “Much Apu About Nothing”.  In the episode, the town of Springfield setups up a Bear Patrol, and bear sightings disappear.  Lisa tries to demonstrate the issue with their logic by offering Homer a Tiger Repelling Rock.  Homer quickly accepts the rock and determines the rock must be working as there are no tigers around.

And now Jive would like to use that same logic to imply their software leads directly to revenue generation, that correlation implies causation.

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Tags: , Social BPM, social technology, worksocial

In case you missed our announcement earlier this week, 2012 was a great year for Appian. Demand for our worksocial BPM software around the world drove record-breaking company performance. Conventional wisdom is that BPM is anti-cyclical to the economy because it promises cost-reduction through automation. I don’t believe that. Traditional BPM had the same tough year every other industry had in 2012.

What I do believe is that “work” has changed. Where it happens, when it happens, who’s involved, and how they get it done. The IT consumerization revolution is far, far from over, but it is past its infancy. Huge numbers of us today already do at least as much work via mobile devices on-the-go as we do in our offices.

That’s what drove Appian’s record year. 98 new customers in 12 months decided our platform is uniquely capable of harnessing social, mobile and cloud innovation to drive value in their business. Global leaders in US and international government, insurance, financial services, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, retail, food and beverage, and other industries joined the Appian community.

You can be part of that community as well – even if you’re not an Appian customer or partner – by coming to Appian World 2013 (April 29-May 1 at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C.). In addition to hearing about BPM successes, lessons learned and industry predictions, you’ll get a first-hand look at the power and simplicity of the Appian BPM Suite. (If you are a customer or partner, you can also sign up for free product training). Register today!

Ben Farrell

Tags: , Appian World 2013, Cloud BPM, mobile BPM, Social BPM, worksocial

“Disconnected is no way to work. While social and mobile technologies inch into the workplace, leading firms push for mile-wide advances.”

So says Investor’s Business Daily‘s Sonja Carberry in a piece from last week’s edition called “Social, Mobile Tools Close Business Gaps; Get Connected.” Ms. Carberry spoke with a number of social/mobile enterprise visionaries for their tips on getting the most business value from – and executive support for – the consumerization of IT. Her top three insights come from Appian CEO Matt Calkins. They discussed the ways Appian customers are using our worksocial platform to embrace a new world of IT and business possibilities using social business software.

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Tags: , Appian World, enterprise social software, investor's business daily, mobile BPM, Social Business Software, worksocial

Last week’s Forrester Forum in Orlando started off with a thought-provoking bang. Forrester VPs Kyle McNabb and James McQuivey delivered a one-two punch on the nature of digital disruption (the conference theme), and its implications for business. The key take-away: embracing digital disruption is an opportunity find fundamentally new ways of doing business. That’s what Appian customers are doing with our worksocial technology.

Kyle gave the set-up: digital disruption is changing the IT landscape through new software-powered digital capabilities (i.e., Social and Mobile). It is destructive to legacy applications and processes. It is not a trend or a fad, because society as a whole has embraced it. It is changing IT from being “supportive of the business” to being “the fabric of business itself.”

James delivered the knock-out: we always talk about technology adoption, the point being that “adopters of new technology do old things in new ways.” Digital disruption, instead, requires technology “internalization” to spark entirely new ways of thinking about what modern business can be.

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Tags: , Forrester, mobile BPM, Social BPM, Social Business Software, worksocial

Atlanta-based Car Stereo Plus (CSP) is an auto dealer expediter. That means they’re the folks who trick out your new ride with extras like GPS, a kicking sound system, leather seats and those shiny spinning rims (if you’re into that sort of thing). They are a small company, about 40 employees, in a market with much larger competitors. They are also the latest company to realize the immense benefits of Appian’s worksocial technology.

CSP co-owner Foster Lee knows that the secret to his company’s success in the Atlanta region – and its ability to grow into other markets – is based on closely connecting a distributed field force to core company processes. Automotive customers are a demanding and fickle bunch (when someone spends a lot of money on a new car, they want it the way they want it, and they want it fast). Keeping CSP’s auto dealer customer happy means deliver excellent service on the cars and trucks those dealers’ customers are buying.

“Worksocial from Appian has turbo-charged our operations and increased our competitive edge,” said Lee. “It is an easy-to-use platform for mobile- and social-based work that is deeply integrated with our core systems and data. Comparing our previous systems to Appian is like comparing a horse and plow to a tractor.”

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Tags: , Cloud BPM, mobile BPM, Social BPM, Social Business Software, worksocial

Forbes.com has just run a piece that is a must-read for anyone contemplating how social technologies should be used in the enterprise. “Completing the Social Business Transformation: A Manifesto,” by Dan Woods, is a clear-headed reminder that we are still at the tip of the iceberg in realizing the value of social business technology – and that most enterprise social tools are woefully immature from a business value perspective.

“It is possible,” he writes of Jive, Chatter, Yammer, etc., ”to see these suites as the end of the road, as the culmination of a set of capabilities into a product category that will last for 30 or 40 years like ERP or CRM. I reject that view and instead assert that the culmination of Social Business will instead be a new paradigm that changes how knowledge is captured, how processes are designed, how applications are created, and how work gets done.” (emphasis added).

Appian knows what to call that new paradigm: worksocial. We are the only vendor that is delivering it today.

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Tags: , BPM software, Forbes, mobile BPM, Social BPM, Social Business Software, worksocial

Our CEO Matt Calkins recently spoke with Dan Woods, technology author and editor at CITO Research, about what truly matters in Social Business, and the crucial  differences between “enterprise social” platforms and Appian’s worksocial platform. I’ll just whet your appetite with a few quotes. You can read the full Q&A here.

“The [enterprise social] tools you mention just facilitate awareness. That is of value, but probably in the long run it’s a feature, not a product. This is a great way to be aware, but the question remains: what are we communicating? What are we collaborating on?”

“Sometimes it’s the absence of change that you need to know about. Sometimes it’s gears turning inside the business deep beneath the surface, and there isn’t a chattering individual to tell you that that gear has changed.You’ve just got to be integrated. You’ve got to be wired into that process and knowledgeable of how the business is integrating with itself.”

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Worksocial is powerful, and that power is being used to address one of the most urgent issues in America today: unemployment. As reported by Government Computer News, the Dept. of Veterans Affairs is using Appian case management for mobile and social engagement with U.S. veterans to help them find government and civilian work.

At a recent VA Job Fair in Detroit, volunteer event support staff spent a matter of minutes getting used to the simple Appian social interface, then used iPads to register, schedule meetings and track progress for thousands of attending veterns. The result, according to the Veterans Employment Services Office (VESO), was that more than 1,300 veterans received tentative job offers, and close to 800 more scored second-round interviews. I can’t think of a more powerful testament to the connectedness and rapid action that just one day of worksocial can deliver.

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Tags: , BPM for Government, Business Process Management, Cloud BPM, enterprise mobility, Social Business Software, worksocial

The Federal Bureau of Investigation launched its new case management system, called Sentinel, last month. Sentinel moves the agency off of paper files and into the 21st Century world of electronically stored and shared case information. This should be good news – and it is, to a degree. Sentinel will make it easier for agency agents to do their jobs, track vital case information, and share that information with other law enforcement and national defense organizations.

Now here’s the bad news (and it’s really bad): The system took a total of 12 years and more than $600 million to complete. These numbers, reported in the Wall Street Journal, include the more than three years and roughly $170 million spent on an earlier digital project called Trilogy that never produced a useable case management system.

What an outrageous waste of time and taxpayer dollars! We the People deserve better, plain and simple. And the fact is, we could have better – better government agency performance supported by better government IT, delivered more quickly and at a fraction of the cost of traditional development approaches – if more agency IT teams would embrace business process management software. The most forward-thinking agencies have already paved the way and proved the value.

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Tags: , application development, BPM for Government, Case Management, Government 2.0, mobile BPM, Social BPM