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.

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It’s nice when doing well and doing good coincide. That’s the case for Appian with a new application being rolled out to the U.S. Army. The application, called Wounded Warrior, uses our BPM software to help speed rehabilitation for U.S. soldiers wounded in the line of duty. It was developed by our partner CollabraLink, and it leverages Appian’s out-of-the-box Case Management capabilities.

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Tags: , Appian, BPM, BPM for Government, Business Process Management, Case Management

Personally, I must abmit, I’ve always been a little skeptical about corporations adopting the word “Green”.  I don’t believe many companies  truly fully adopt the “Green” term beyond the marketing department, and for basic economic reasons.  The reality is that corporations are mostly motivated by revenue generation and new “Green” technologies are expensive and an economic luxury that won’t be broadly adopted across all businesses until they really reduce costs and drive economic efficiency.

Don’t get me wrong.  I know every right-minded person cares about the environment and wants to adopt “Green” technologies.  I personnally have been looking into adding solar panels to my home;  measuring how much roof space I have, checking county permit laws, figuring out the layout of the panels, and calculating how many Kw I can generate daily if I had solar.  But then I look at the price and wham!, reality smacks me in the face.  I can’t afford it!

Fortunately, being “Green” has merged with economic reality in the world of Enterprise IT, and that merger is happening in the Cloud.

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Tags: , Amazon, Appian, Appian Anywhere, BPM, BPM in the Cloud, Cloud Computing, Green, Sustainability

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.

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Tags: , Appian, Appian Anywhere, BPM, Business Process Management Suite

Thanks for joining me in this series of 7 posts about The Technical Case for Case Management.  It’s been an interesting thought experiment and exciting to see the formation of what could be the next enterprise software trend or evolution of the BPM market.    I find myself asking “Will BPM evolve beyond process?”

Case Management has much promise to be that next evolution for BPM.  Case Management focuses on problems where traditional BPM has failed, such as the ad-hoc nature of many knowledge workers, Business Data Events and Business Data Reporting instead of just process, Collaboration, and working towards non-process related business goals.  But Case Management has much to learn from BPM as well, like:  Model-Driven Design techniques, Business / IT Collaboration, Discovery, and Analysis.  More »

Tags: , Appian, BPM, Case Management

Welcome back to this series on The Technical Case for Case Management.  In previous posts I covered an Introduction to Case Management, Ad-Hoc Activities, Real-Time Events, Enterprise Content Management, and Collaboration.  The goal of each of these posts is to explore what technical features are required to truly have a comprehensive Case Management solution.

In this post, I’ll be exploring Reporting and Analysis in the context of Case Management.

Coming from a BPM perspective, let’s first see how well typical BPM reporting and analysis capabilities can satisfy Case Management requirements.

BPM reporting and analysis tools often make the assumption that the goal in analysis is to reduce processing times and increase efficiency.  BPMS platforms provide tools like bottleneck analysis, simulation, and Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), which all drive to this typical goal in analyzing process and activity performance, removing inefficiencies, and streamlining processes.

Case Management goals though are not as predefined as BPM.  The goals in Case Management are often not directly related to process efficiency or activity performance.  Case Management often drives towards specific business goals that may or may not entail process efficiency.  For example, Case Management goals might be:  ”Increase revenue per client”; “Increase customer satisfaction”; “Reduce risk”, etc.. More »

Tags: , Analysis, Appian, Appian Anywhere, BPM, Case Management, psHealth, Reporting, Simulation

Only a few posts left on the topic of “The Technical Case for Case Management”.  If you are catching up – refer to my previous posts (Part1, Part2, Part3, Part4).  During this series I’m exploring thoughts around exactly what is Case Management and what technical features are really required to have a complete Case Management solution.

In this post, I’ll be exploring the role of Collaboration and Enterprise 2.0 in the context of Case Management.  I’ve been looking forward to discussing this topic.  Collaboration and Social Media are hot topics right now and I believe many organizations are still trying to understand how to apply consumer style collaboration (Twitter, Facebook, etc..) in the context of their organization. More »

Tags: , Appian, BPM, Case Management, Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Social

In the previous three blog posts around the Technical Case for Case Management (Introduction, Ad-Hoc Activities, Real-Time Events and Business Intelligence) I’ve been posting my thoughts on what technical features are truly required to have a complete case management solution.

For today, I’ll be raising the requirement for native Enterprise Content Management (ECM) when building a Case Management solution.

Arguably, the relationship between Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Case Management has been much like the relationship between Workflow and Business Process Management.  Workflow is a foundational element to BPM, but workflow alone does not make a BPM system.  Workflow is the simplistic routing of tasks from one person to another.  Any BPM platform can provide this basic level of functionality, but without a workflow component, the system could not be considered a BPM platform at all. More »

Tags: , Ad-Hoc, Appian, BPM, BPMN, Case Management, Enterprise Content Management, Workflow

We’re proud to say that our CEO Matthew Calkins has been named one of only seven finalists in the 2010 American Business Awards in the category of “Executive of the Year – Computer Software (Up to 2,500 Employees).” The ABA’s (known as “the Stevies”) are the nation’s premier business awards program. More than 2,700 entries from organizations of all sizes and in virtually every industry were submitted for consideration. More »

Tags: , American Business Awards, Appian, BPM, Business Process Management, Stevie Awards

If you’re just catching up on this discussion on the technical case for case management, please catch up on my earlier two posts (Part 1 – Introduction, Part 2 – Ad-Hoc Activities).

In this section I will be introducing the technical feature and use of Real-Time Events and Business Intelligence in Case Management solutions.

As I discussed in the previous two posts, Case Management solutions adopt many BPM concepts, such as processes and BPMN ad-hoc activities, but their behavior can be seen as different from the normal sequential process flow.  Case Management is really first about the results or data and not about the steps on how the result or data is achieved.  The catch phrase for Case Management might be “The End Justifies the Means”. More »

Tags: , Appian, BPM, BPMN, Case Management, Events, Real-Time