The latest Appian Tips & Tricks webinar will again feature myself and Brett Shomaker, our Group Technology Program Manager, walking through all the new features and giving a demonstration of the new data management capabilities.  Please register here or on Appian Forum if you would like to attend.

Appian Tips & Tricks webinar will be held on Thursday, September 16th, 12 PM to 1 PM EST.  Live questions will be handled during the call. 

Specifically, feature capabilities include:

We look forward to seeing you on the 16th at 12 PM EST.  For those of you who cannot make it, a full recording of all Tips & Tricks webinars are made available on Appian Forum under the Resources Tab.

Thanks,

Malcolm Ross, Director Product Management

An ATO is only awarded after a rigorous and comprehensive assessment of the solution’s management, operational, and technical security controls. The assessment is performed under the Federal Information Security Act of 2002 (FISMA) framework for managing information security for all information systems used or operated by a U.S. federal government agency or by a contractor or other organization on behalf of a federal agency.

Federal CIO Vivek Kundra has made it clear that cloud computing is an important initiative for the federal government. But the cloud model is still emerging, and many agencies are looking for confirmation that it is secure and reliable.

Appian’s ATO certification should go a long way to providing that confirmation for government BPM in the cloud. You can learn more by listening to a great podcast interview with Terry Wise, Director of Business Development at Amazon Web Services, and Samir Gulati, VP of Marketing at Appian, on the BetterGov blog.

Ben Farrell, director of Corporate Communications

The report states that Appian is “consistently a Leader in Forrester’s Human-Centric BPM Suite Wave evaluations.” That said, the really important thing to note about the 2010 report is that it is not simply an update of a previous Wave report.

In the past, Forrester issued individual BPM Wave reports fragmented across human-centric, document-centric, Java and .Net technologies. The 2010 report is positioned as a “BPM Suite” report, consolidating all those previous flavors into one view of the BPM suite market. That means Appian’s leadership position is now measured across a much larger pool of potential competitors.

Forrester found that the Appian BPM Suite provides “a strong all-around offering” and was one of two vendors described as providing “the best overall combination of modeling, design and development features for business and technical roles driving process improvement.”

Further, “Appian stands out for its completely Web-based environment – across process discovery, development and execution. Appian’s Web-based environment provides process analysts, process developers, and business users with rich and intuitive interfaces for building and managing business processes.”

Appian continues to drive BPM suite market innovation. The combination of our technology, people and methodology turns process improvement into rapid business value for our customers. I encourage you to read the Forrester report – and then contact Appian to discuss how we can help you create a more agile and dynamic business.

Samir Gulati, VP of Marketing

The latest post on this topic is from psHealth, a company with real experience applying Case Management solutions to the Healthcare industry.  The topic centers around “Case Management System Design Challenges”, which is a great follow-on to some previous posts on “The Technical Case for Case Management“.

psHealth states

“Based on our experience there are 5 key challenges that must be addressed when designing a case management software:

• Poorly defined processes
• Multiple service lines
• What to do with all the paper?
• The man vs machine debate
• Data Integration.. sorry but it really is the future”

There are some great words of wisdom in here if you are exploring case management, and I can’t agree enough with the last point on Data Integration.  Data Integration and Master Data Management (MDM) seems to be on a collision course with BPM and Case Management.  I expect to see some great innovation in this area over the next 2 years.

Malcolm Ross

Director Product Management

John’s role is to lead the business process design team and lead the charge in meeting AGF Trust’s mandate to innovate its processes. In the two-part article, he discusses several critical issues for creating and growing a BPM Program, including how to pick your first process, how to build the business case for expansion, and the crucial importance of having a BPM Center of Excellence (CoE).

John will be presenting on this same topic at the IQPC Business Process Excellence in Financial Services conference in London, Spetember 21-22. If you are in the financial services industry, you should check it out.

Ben Farrell, director of Corporare Communications

Registration is open on Appian Forum for all Appian customers and partners.

As a reminder, we’ll be continuing the monthly Tips and Tricks webinar in August.

In addition, the Appian Forum Summer “Plug-in Power” Contest is still active.  Developers who submit a valid Appian plug-in will receive a $20 gift card, and the winner of the most compelling Appian plug-in will receive an Apple iPad.

We’ve recently reworked our components page in Appian Forum for easier navigation and sharing of plug-in Smart Services, Expression Functions, and Utilities.  The list of cool new plug-ins is constantly growing, with some great recent additions, including:

• SFTP Smart Services – Securely send and receive files with SFTP protocol over SSH (encrypting both command and data packets)
• iCal Smart Service – Create iCal calendar invitations in Appian Process to coordinate corporate calendars
• Twitter Smart Services and Expressions – Automatically create, read, and delete Twitter posts from Appian process models
• Upload and Download Google Documents – Exchange documents from Appian with Google docs for easy sharing of documents over the internet and corporate enterprise.

We Look forward to getting some great new additions during the contest period.

See you tomorrow.

Malcolm Ross, Director Product Management

So far in 2010, our new customers have come primarily from the federal government, financial services, insurance and healthcare industries. Anyone remotely up on current events can identify the common drivers in those markets right now: reducing cost, minimizing risk, driving collaboration and improving the customer (or constituent) experience.

BPM is the best way to tackle all four of these objectives at once. BPM that’s easy to use, delivers fast value and offers flexible deployment options for on-premise, SaaS, or a mix-and-match of both is the only way to tackle all four under current economic conditions. That’s precisely what Appian offers through a powerful combination of technology, people and methodology.

Appian’s success is based exclusively on the success of our customers. So it with a big thanks to them that I point out Appian’s many industry accolades over the past six months. Once again, we were named to KMWorld’s 100 Companies that Matter in Knowledge Management. Lead411 gave us a “Hot Company” award for the Washington, D.C. region. Our leadership team was named a finalist for the Northern Virginia Technology Council’s “Hot Ticket – Hottest Management Team” award. Our President and CEO Matthew Calkins was named an Executive of the Year finalist in the American Business Awards (the “Stevies”).

In addition, Gartner identified Appian as one of the six fastest-growing vendors in the worldwide Application Infrastructure and Middleware Software market, and IDC named us one of the fastest-growing vendors in the worldwide Application Deployment Software market.

It has been a good six months for Appian. In the next six and beyond, we’ll keep growing by delivering what our customers need, in the way they want to consume it, to help their businesses grow.

Ben Farrell, Director of Corporate Communications

The federal government is increasingly looking to BPM to solve process issues, like Security Processing, that are of broad applicability across agencies and departments.

Dealing with varying levels of security requirements in ramping up new federal employees and contractors is a common pain. It is usually handled through manual, paper-based processes involving lots of documentation to be passed around, verified and tracked across multiple systems. This means major time and effort for the staff performing the processing, and delays in getting new hires into a productive work mode.

Other process areas common across government organizations include things like Procurement and Sourcing, Program Planning, Budgeting and Management, Grants Management, and a variety of HR processes. Not coincidentally, these are areas where Appian is seeing great success.

BPM software helps the federal government solve pervasive cost and productivity problems – and not in the “tried-and-failed” approach of commercial off-the-shelf software packages that cause as many headaches as they solve thanks to rigid coding. While attacking an area of common concern, BPM solutions are easily configurable – by business users – to the unique requirements of an individual agency.

BPM technology directly addresses the current administration’s mandates for openness, effectiveness, cost-cutting and collaboration across the government. When coupled with Cloud Computing, the benefits are even more pronounced, and quicker to achieve.

There will be more to come on government adoption of BPM in the Cloud. For now, I’ll close with a reminder about why BPM in the government really matters: every one of us, as taxpayers and consumers of government services, benefits when government operations are conducted more efficiently and effectively.

Ben Farrell, Director of Corporate Communications

We’ve seen these positive impacts through cutting-edge Appian case management deployments with customers like the Benenden Healthcare Society, the U.S. Army’s Wounded Warrior application, and many others. We are now very excited to announce a new development: Appian partner psHEALTH is leveraging our Appian Anywhere SaaS BPM platform to rapidly develop and deliver new case management solutions for its healthcare clients.

psHEALTH is the leading provider of cloud-based, customized patient management and workflow solutions to independent healthcare providers in the UK. Combining their extensive healthcare experience with our BPM technology allows psHEALTH to deliver complex solutions at a fraction of the time and cost of traditional projects.

For example, psHEALTH delivered an end-to-end patient case management system to its customer Chartis Medical & Rehabilitation in under 60 days. The solution, called Symbio-Sys, has been shortlisted for the 2010 Claims Technology Awards in the Client Care category. (The Awards recognize excellence in the development and application of technology to enhance the efficiency, speed and cost-effectiveness of the claims process).

Appian, psHEALTH and Chartis are presenting a webinar on July 8 at 11:00am ET/16:00 London. The event will highlight Symbio-Sys as an example of a new breed of case management applications that can be delivered quickly, with no upfront investment or IT resource drain, to dramatically raise the bar for organizational performance and patient/customer service.

Please join us for the webinar. Register here. 

Ben Farrell, director of Corporate Communications

“Utilizing Appian’s powerful yet easy-to-use BPM platform within our already robust product line will help our customers achieve optimal efficiency in daily tasks, and provide management teams with the tools to view the health of their organization at the department or corporate level,” said Samuel Schrage, President of AnyDoc Software. “Capturing your business processes and decision data from the time it enters your organization, monitoring its progression, and having it available immediately at a lower cost provides companies with great advantages. Real-time status of overall business processes with a highlight on exceptions, approvals, and related activities keeps executive management responsive to the pulse of the company.”

The Appian BPM Suite allows companies to be more efficient, adaptable, and effective in accomplishing business tasks through constant management and real-time monitoring. People, applications, required tasks, compliance guidelines, approvals, and more are all wrapped into a managed process that can be monitored for continuous effectiveness with real-time data, robust analytics, and reporting. AnyDoc Software’s solutions provide companies with quick, cost-effective, and accurate tools to assimilate business data into the organization. As a data capture leader, AnyDoc utilizes their full range of products, including AnyDoc®CAPTUREit™, Infiniworx®, and the flagship OCR for AnyDoc®, to classify documents and extract data from scanned paper or imported images and data files — including e-mails and attachments.

“The details are in the data,” said Schrage, “and AnyDoc is one of the best at getting to the data.”

Together with Appian, AnyDoc will deliver world-class end-to-end solutions like AnyDoc®INVOICE™ BPM Suite and vertical solutions for Insurance, Healthcare, Banking and Finance and other markets.

With Appian-enabled AnyDoc solutions, incoming documents including paper, scanned images, faxes, and e-mails are automatically categorized and routed to the appropriate business unit without any presorting required. Data is captured and validated from nearly any business document, with minimal manual data entry required. The accurate data and the document images are then automatically routed to the appropriate workflow, back office information systems, and/or document management repository. For example, document exceptions can be routed according to a company’s existing business practices, and e-mail automatically triggered when follow-up or escalation is required. Auditing productivity or outstanding tasks, determining processing bottlenecks, and identifying project status is easy with a dashboard of real-time data, offering customized views depending on a user’s status or responsibilities. The result is cost savings combined with increases in productivity and data accuracy as companies efficiently and accurately distribute work-in-progress while exceptions are fast-tracked with up-to-the-minute data available at a glance.

“We are proud to partner with a well respected industry leader like AnyDoc. The combination of process and automated data capture and classification will result in significant value to the customers of these solutions,” said Marc Wilson, Vice President of Global Partnerships at Appian. “Forward-looking software vendors like AnyDoc understand the tremendous internal and customer value that can be derived from leveraging a BPM platform to enhance existing offerings and speed development of new products and services. OEM relationships such as this one are central to our growth strategy, and will bring Appian’s state-of-the-art BPM technology to a wide range of new user communities.”