Attendees at Appian World 2012 broke out into 3 tracks for beginners, developers, and executives. Developers heard about cloud security from CJ Moses of Amazon Web Services, and Agile Development Best Practices from Ben Allen, Appian consultant. Executives learned about Delivering Lifetime Value with BPM from Dileep Srinivasan, Cognizant, and Extreme Collaboration from Jaimeet Gulati, EDP Renewables (a hot topic today!) We sat in on the beginner track. First up was Dr. Michael zur Muehlen, Stevens Institute of Technology, with “Introduction to the BPM Life Cycle: Maturing BPM Efforts.” Download a copy of Dr. zur Muehlen’s presentation here.

“If it doesn’t make three people angry, it is not a process.” – Michael Hammer

Key Takeaways

- Analysis Frameworks provide content

- Transactions perform work, Analytics manage work

- The diagram isn’t everything

- Improve your capabilities in 3 areas:

- Process Maturity

- Process Management Maturity

- Organizational Maturity

Process Analysis

“Most businesses have just 3 core processes:  sell stuff, deliver stuff, and making sure you have stuff to sell and deliver”

- Geary Rummler

The objectives of analyzing your processes are innovation, efficiency, and compliance. When getting started, it’s important to organize your content into a process framework to “map” your business. The framework covers everything from support processes (accounting, hr, etc) to strategy and governance.

Process Design

There are six process abstraction levels, ranging in complexity from Business Activities to Detailed Process Flows. The first three levels comprise the “what” – what are the products? What are the delivery units? The second three levels comprise the “how” – how does the process flow? How does the system function?

Process Implementation

“Vision without execution is hallucination” – Thomas Edison

Developers have a tendency to throw in every option, resulting in a confusing mess. The customer just wants to know how to do what they want. The diagram isn’t everything — the ultimate outcome is what really matters. Implement the process so the end user can achieve their goal.

Process Management & Improvement

Process analytics are invaluable. Data mining and collecting process intelligence will help you track and refine your processes.

Theory of constraints:

1. Define the goal – performance or compliance?

2. Define key metrics – cycle time, wait time, resource utilization

3. Identify the constraint – find the bottleneck activity/resource

4. Exploit the constraint – maximize use of the bottleneck

5. Subordinate to the constraint – limit upstream throughput

6. Elevate the constraint – invest and improve

7. Avoid inertia – start the process again

Check out Dr. zur Muehlen’s slides for a look at his “Business Process Maturity” flowchart and his BPM Lifecycle graphic.

Tags: , Appian World 2012, BPM Lifecycle

John Verburgt, Director of BPM, and Brian Toba, Director, Regulatory & Exchange Business Systems, CME Group presented a case study on lessons learned from scaling BPM.

CME group is the world’s leading and most diverse derivatives marketplace. CME Group exchanges offer the widest range of global benchmark products across all major asset classes, including futures and options based on interest rates, equity indexes, foreign exchange, energy, agricultural commodities, metals, weather and real estate.
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The first customer case study presentation at Appian World 2012 was given by Richard Pomeroy, Head of Information Systems, from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD).

The EBRD is an international financial institution, which promotes transition to market economies in 29 countries from central Europe to central Asia. They are owned by 63 countries, the European Union and the European Investment Bank. The EBRD provides project financing for banks, industries and businesses. For each project, they mobilize investment capital and assign a dedicated team of specialists with specific sectoral, regional, legal and environmental skills.
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Tags: , Appian World 2012, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, mobile BPM

After a lively presentation from Daryl Plummer, Matt Calkins, Appian CEO, took the stage to discuss his vision for Appian and BPM in 2012.

Highlights from his presentation include:

• Native Mobile is growing in importance. In the past 5 years, sales of iPhones, iPads and Android devices have skyrocketed. Native mobile apps are easy to use and enable universal participation.
• Appian’s cloud BPM version has been out for 3 years and is stable and portable. It enables anyone to move from on-premise to a private or public cloud with complete security & control.
• Social BPM for Work – it’s the no-training interface. It’s teaching, portable, scalable, and fun.

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Tags: , Appian World 2012, Matt Calkins

We’re at the Reston Hyatt today, for Appian World 2012. The theme of the conference is “Tap the Power of Process Innovation in the Mobile, Cloud and Social Age.” There were over 650 registrations, including 230 unique organizations from 15 countries! Attendees include customers, partners, prospects, analysts, and the media.

We’ll be liveblogging presentations today and tomorrow, so stay tuned. Presenters today will include Daryl Plummer from Gartner, Appian CEO Matt Calkins, and Sandy Kemsley, in addition to customer case studies and BPM training sessions. View the agenda here. You can also follow along with the conference on Twitter, and view pictures and video at Facebook.

The opening keynote was given by Daryl Plummer, Group Vice President at Gartner. His topic was “Delivering Enterprise Performance Breakthroughs with Extreme Collaboration.”

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The famous German statesman, Otto von Bismark, is credited with saying “Politics is the art of the possible.”  So too goes technology, particularly in insurance.  Lots of things are theoretically possible to do with insurance information systems, if there are no constraints on resources.  Insurance CIOs are never in that position.  In fact, they are in the opposite corner, struggling to maintain legacy systems and still squeeze out some budget for technological innovations that will delight customers and employees.  For them, developing new innovations is “the art of the possible.”  In practice, not much can get accomplished, which is why so many insurers find themselves technologically behind.

That state of affairs is being upended as will be demonstrated at next week’s Appian World conference.

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Tags: , Appian World 2012, BPM for Insurance, BPM in the Cloud, BPM software, Business Process Management, Cloud Computing

Appian is a regular sponsor of CXO Media’s “CIO Perspectives” conference series. At tomorrow’s CIO Perspectives New York, our CEO Matt Calkins will discuss Appian’s vision for BPM software in the modern age of mobility, cloud computing and social business collaboration.

This will be a preview of the keynote presentation Matt will deliver next week at Appian World 2012. Pre-registration for the conference is closing this week, so make sure you sign up.

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Tags: , Appian World 2012, BPM in the Cloud, BPM software, Business Process Management Software, CIO Perspectives, mobile BPM, Social BPM

It’s an exciting time for business process management software. As the technology drives deeper into the mainstream of enterprise IT, it is intersecting with enterprise mobility and social business collaboration efforts. As more BPM projects mature into enterprise-wide process improvement programs, Cloud BPM is offering a new way to scale BPM initiatives. As Big Process meets Big Data, organizations are re-thinking the relationship between the two.

So what does it all mean – and how do you get ready and execute to get the most value? The slate of industry analyst keynote sessions at Appian World 2012 – from Gartner’s Daryl Plummer, Forrester Research’s Clay Richardson, noted BPM expert and Column 2 blogger Sandy Kemsley, and MWD Advisors’ Neil Ward-Dutton – has your answers.

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Tags: , Appian World 2012, BPM in the Cloud, Business Process Management, mobile BPM, Social BPM

Mobile access to processes and information has been a key point of differentiation for Appian for the past year.   Appian now leads the market in Mobile BPM and still remains the only BPMS vendor with a native mobile application for all leading mobile platforms (Apple, Android, and Blackberry).

For Appian World 2012, we are inviting all of our attendees to “Go Mobile”.  The Appian mobile apps will de deployed to enable real-time access to the Appian World 2012 conference from any mobile device allowing attendees to engage with: More »

Tags: , Appian World 2012, Mobile, mobile BPM

Our CEO, Matt Calkins, calls the current state of Business Process Management software offerings “feature-incomplete.” The flurry of BPM technology acquisitions by stack vendors over the last two-plus years may create an attendant assumption that the market has “matured.” While important leaps forward have been made, Appian believes BPM software has yet to reach its true functional potential and organizational value.

The true value of Business Process Management software will not be realized through the improvement of discrete processes. Not even through the holistic and centralized governance of a variety of core processes. BPM software will truly emerge as the best way to organize and execute work when it becomes the single platform, and the single environment for unifying and presenting all the systems, data and collaboration a decision maker needs, in the moment they are needed.

BPM software isn’t there yet, and it’s on-going evolution will not be driven by stack vendors already consumed with sorting out their Frankenstein’s Monster BPM product portfolios. Appian remains exclusively dedicated to pushing the envelope on what BPM software is and what it can do. You can hear more about Appian’s vision, and how the next version of our product will take us all closer to it, by attending Appian World 2012.

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Tags: , Appian Cloud, Appian World 2012, BPM in the Cloud, Business Process Management Software, mobile BPM, Social BPM