The problem is, most BPM software vendors (and frankly, many industry pundits) have a limited view of what Social BPM really is. They relegate it to collaborative process design – making it easier for a handful of pre-designated people to work together in developing a process diagram. This is, at best, a single. The grand-slam homerun happens when Social BPM is applied to real-time collaborations across all employees (and customers) while business processes are being executed.

Let’s say you work in customer support for a large insurance firm. A customer has logged a trouble ticket for a rather mundane issue, and you have received a task with an appropriately moderate priority level. Let’s also say that, unbeknownst to you, a sales rep is sitting in a meeting with that customer discussing a large up-sell opportunity. While the support issue is nothing major, it is sticking in the customer’s craw and jeopardizing the deal. Through a Social BPM activity stream, the rep can do a search for the customer name, pull up all info related to that customer (including the trouble ticket event) and instantly post a comment about the sudden and unexpected urgency to resolve it. You instantly see the comment, take care of the mundane issue, and before the rep leaves the meeting, the problem is fixed.

If you’re using Appian, all of that took place via a single unified interface that’s as easy to use as Facebook. Unlike Facebook, however, Appian unites complex back-end enterprise systems, such as those used across your support and sales departments, and allows you to read data from and take action on those various systems from that single interface.

Social BPM isn’t limited to internal system and human events, either. Here’s another example:

You work for a property management company in Chicago. You have set up your Appian Social BPM feed to automatically track and post Twitter tweets containing the word “relocation.” A post appears in your Appian interface that says, “About to announce HQ relocation to Chicago. Start the apartment hunting!” You check the poster’s profile and see that she works for ACME, Inc.

ACME hasn’t issued their corporate press release on the HQ move yet, so your sales team has an opportunity to scoop competitors. Still in the Appian interface, you launch a case called “Jump on this Chicago relocation opportunity,” and add the comment “We have lots of Chicago apartments. Find ACME’s HR contact and offer some incentives.” This case goes immediately into process, gets assigned to your Chicago rep, and you’re off to the races.

These are just two examples. Once you get your head around the real potential for run-time Social BPM, the possibilities are virtually unlimited.

Ben Farrell, Director, Corporate Communications

The story behind the numbers is testament to how enterprise mobility, social collaboration and cloud computing are reshaping the IT landscape. Appian’s Mobile BPM, Cloud BPM and Social BPM address the broken state of enterprise software today.

The mobile and social revolutions are driving the “consumerization” of IT. In their wake, traditional enterprise software is no longer solving business problems. Increasingly, it is the problem.

It requires too much time, and is much too costly, to modernize these systems to deliver the type of mobile experience customers are demanding. Even if you push through that arduous ordeal, these systems remain stove-piped across business functions. Plus, you now have new levels of platform/OS discrepancies and security issues to deal with. All of this contributes to the increasingly fractured nature of an organization. On the social side, customer expectations about how they interact with a company are changing. Employee needs for how they interact with each other are changing. The nature of work is increasingly collaborative, and that is what social technology supports uniquely well.

Given that something north of 80% of an IT department’s budget is allocated just for the care and feeding needed to keep the lights on, there is precious little room in the current system for the focus on innovation required by these evolving needs.

That’s why 2011 was such a great year for Appian. Business leaders and IT executives are increasingly turning to us as their engine for innovation. Our BPM platform meets the requirements of the mobile revolution. Through “design once – deploy everywhere” we instantly enable comprehensive mobility that overcomes platform fracturing. We feature highly secure mobile processing. We deliver rapid mobile enablement of applications. The Appian BPM Suite also addresses the social revolution by masking extreme power behind an intuitive activity stream interface.  We seamlessly merge structured actions with unstructured events, and deliver collaboration that is firmly rooted in business events and outcomes.

But there’s no rest for the weary. Come to Appian World 2012 in April to get a sneak peak at Appian 7, and see how we will continue to push the envelope on modern BPM software capabilities.

- Ben Farrell, Director, Corporate Communications

Matt’s presentation will illustrate the game-changing opportunities that mobile, cloud and social present for process innovation. He will also outline how Appian BPM customers are tapping the power of these emerging – and inevitable – technology models today to transform processes across their enterprise, through the supply chain, and out to customers.  Malcolm Ross, Appian’s Director of Product Management, will also be on-hand to give a short demonstration of the Appian BPM Suite in action.

Process Excellence Week, Orlando is not only the original but the largest annual meeting as part of PEX networks Global Summit Series. Running for over 13 year’s the meeting has a longstanding history in bringing together the Process Excellence community for exceptional networking, knowledge share and benchmarking. This year’s format is designed to enable you to bring together all of your process strategies as well as embed and execute them within your business. The conference will focus on the key themes of Process Improvement, Process Management, Process For Innovation, Strategy & Execution, Culture, and The Customer.

We hope to see you there!

-Ben Farrell, Director, Corporate Communications

Mobile app development is expensive, and a potential governance nightmare. But it doesn’t have to be.

A single mobile enterprise app is costly to develop (anywhere from $50K to $150K, by estimates). Now multiply that by the number of applications in your business. And that’s just to develop on one platform. Mobile Apps require specialized skills across numerous platforms that are constantly updating. With Appian’s Mobile BPM you take a huge bite out of that cost, time and skills equation. Extra development cost goes to zero, as any app created on the Appian platform becomes a native mobile app simply through a series of check boxes. Appian’s code-free composition means you compose a process application once and automatically publish it, with full native mobile capabilities, to every popular device platform.

The management headaches are another significant hurdle. In a blog post on ZDNet, Ted points out that already, 35% of US information workers use a smartphone for work. What should your device management policy be? How do you know the platform(s) your company chooses to support will still be leading the market (or even in the market) five years from now? Further, employees increasingly use their personal mobile devices for work, regardless of any official device policy (if one even exists). With Appian, you don’t have to choose. iOS, Android and RIM are all natively – and automatically – supported. And as the mobile platform market continues to evolve, Appian will adjust accordingly.

Mobile app development is becoming a must in the enterprise. The demographic trend is gaining force, and the clear business value afforded by mobility is starting to be realized. Corporate business and IT leaders (and their IT staff) are struggling to keep up with mobile workers’ expectations. Appian can remove some significant and complex obstacles. Read more in our white paper, “Business Agility in the Mobile Age.”

-Ben Farrell, Director, Corporate Communications

First, like the rest of the country, we are concerned about federal fiscal policy and wringing out wasteful spending. Second, we believe BPM software provides a new opportunity to transform agency acquisition practices. Our Acquisition Business Management (ABM) solution allows federal purchasing organizations to increase the efficiency, visibility and mission-alignment of all pre-award, award, and post-award activities within the acquisition lifecycle.

Speaking last week at a meeting of the President’s Management Advisory Council in Washington, Mr. VanRoekel talked about “greatly reduc[ing] the complexity of interacting” in order to “streamline and produce a buying phenomenon that we don’t see today.”

Agency-by-agency VMOs are a good start, but their existence alone will not solve the heart of the federal acquisition problem. The actual purchasing processes in use today are antiquated, manual, loosely-structured and opaque. This creates mountains of paperwork, a lack of oversight and accountability, and ultimately, costly delays in provisioning the goods and services that agencies require to complete their missions.

Federal purchasing organizations in the Marine Corps., Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), Defense Acquisition University (DAU) and many others are realizing substantial performance gains and cost-savings using ABM. And the best part of all is that ABM is a modular solution that is configured, not coded. This means no costly rip-and-replace, and it enables the rapid evolution of a flexible solution, tailored to each agency’s unique requirements. For more details on ABM in action, view our on-demand webinar, “DISA: Streamlining DoD Procurement.”

-Ben Farrell, Director, Corporate Communications

Appian is now instrumental in supporting NESDIS’ mission to be “the world’s most comprehensive source and recognized authority for satellite products, environmental information, and official assessments of the environment in support of societal and economic decisions.

This is a very cool use case for BPM, and it made me start thinking about the ever-widening types of applications for which our on-premise and Cloud BPM, Mobile BPM and Social BPM is being used.

So far in 2011, Appian has signed up roughly 70 new customers. Government is perennially a stronghold for us (we have more than 35 departments and agencies using our BPM software), and agencies with highly divergent and specialized missions are finding common ground in the value of process improvement through Appian. Consider NOAA’s implementation in contrast to the Dept. of Treasury/OCC’s Personnel Administration and Security System, for example, or the Appian-based procurement system in use at the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA).

Financial Services and Insurance have also been strong markets for us for some time, but the use cases in those markets have made a pronounced shift from areas of back-office automation to growth-driving applications focused on customer engagement, service and cross-sell/up-sell. Mobile BPM is playing a large part in this, because it is unchaining financial and insurance professional from their desktops, giving them more time and freedom to be face-to-face with customers. And while they are meeting with those customers, they are still connected to the processes and data they need to take real-time business action.

Outside of those beachhead markets, we’ve seen a diversification of the types of commercial organizations choosing BPM, and Appian specifically. Healthcare has jumped on board in a big way. The demand for reducing healthcare cost is clearly a driver (that’s something BPM has always been good at), but again, Mobile BPM is making big waves. Mobility is transforming how patient care is delivered, and embedding process in those mobile applications delivers real-time doctor/nurse/patient collaboration whether at the hospital, in a traveling clinic or for in-home care.

Energy is another industry where Appian is coming on strong – particularly (but not exclusively) in green energy. Efficient operations are key for wind and other renewable energy outfits, because until green energy really goes mainstream, the margins will remain fairly slim. But a common theme for energy companies of any type is field service, and we’re seeing an explosion of demand for those types of mobile process solutions. Maintenance issues mean lost kilowatts, and worse yet – furious customers. Identifying and fixing problems in the field before they impact energy production and customer satisfaction is a major business need.

I could go on, but suffice to say that appreciation for what BPM can mean for a variety of businesses is growing. At the same time, Appian continues to push the envelope on BPM software can do. That is why we’re finding such fertile territory in new markets, and in new applications within traditionally strong markets.

-Ben Farrell, Director, Corporate Communications

It’s worth taking a look at how tablet devices are evaluated in the market to understand the work changes happening in light of their proliferation. Recently, John Breedan II of Government Computer News reviewed the Motion Computing F5v Tablet PC. He called it, “a perfect little computer for medical stations and other places where records need to be looked up on the go but where portability is still an issue.” I wouldn’t limit that statement to any specific type of work; it happens everywhere.

The Apple iPad 2 review in PC Magazine touts the “slimmer design and faster processing” – meaning it’s easy to cart around and can do more real work. Mobile work is much more than merely info retrieval. It requires two-way integration with back-end systems, the ability to take action on critical decisions, and real-time, contextual collaboration.

These tablets are important for anyone looking to get more done faster. Our native-mobile BPM software allows business users of all levels to utilize full-featured process applications that keep them connected to critical business processes. Our software works on every major mobile platform and includes rich collaboration, mobile forms and task approval, notifications, and enterprise security to support true enterprise mobility needs.

But the software — no matter how great it is — still needs hardware. Picking the right tools for your company or agency is no small task. If you are not checking these sites already, you should be for the latest reviews on the latest products:

CNET

PC Magazine

TechRadar

GadgetCage

Appian works with all the best mobile devices, so pick the tool that works for you, and our software will make it sing!

-Ben Farrell, Director, Corporate Communications

The first point is that “easy as Facebook” in the enterprise simply means leveraging a UI concept – not the specifics of other bells and whistles. Encouraging effective social collaboration in business means providing the familiar experience of a running feed and easy interaction through posting and collaboration. The reason this matters is because an increasing number of professionals, and the vast majority of younger people entering the workforce, already live significant portions of their personal lives through such a UI. They bring that concept with them to the office. One of the hardest aspects of new enterprise systems is change management. Leveraging a pre-understood concept just makes sense. The fact that Facebook has significantly muddied that experience for itself simply provides a cautionary lesson to the enterprise.

The second, and more important point, is that “social technology” and “social business collaboration” are two different beasts underneath that common UI. At Appian, we believe that a familiar social UI must be exclusively tied to business events and outcomes to drive any real business value. It’s not about discussing your favorite movies; it’s about quickly pulling the right people into the right system- or human-generated business event. That’s how our social BPM is architected.

I wrote an article on the difference between social technology and social business collaboration for BPM.com. Please read it and share your thoughts.

-Ben Farrell, Director, Corporate Communications

Mobile devices are providing consumers with a level of connectivity (to friends, co-workers, communities of interest, and data) that has never been achieved by PC desktops. Mobile computing processors are now practically on par with many PC Desktop/Laptop systems currently in use, utilizing dual-core processors and up to 1 gigabyte of memory. In addition, mobile devices are delivering features never obtained on a PC, such as: instant-on operating systems, extreme portability, low cost, and always-on Internet connectivity. Consumers are reacting to this surge in mobile innovation with an unprecedented boom in mobile device sales. IDC reported growth in mobile devices from 2009 to 2010 increased by 55% with more than 269.6 million devices shipped.

The benefits of mobile computing are clear: enhanced responsiveness, faster access to critical data, greater efficiency, and greater customer satisfaction. Despite this, many enterprise IT organizations remain slow to adopt an enterprise mobile strategy that goes beyond mere voice and email access. New challenges and requirements must be considered in the age of extremely portable and losable devices to ensure enterprise data is kept secure.

As enterprise IT professionals react to mobile adoption trends, they must evaluate and then mobile-develop applications that comply with a variety of security requirements, including:

1. Secure Network Communication
2. Secure Local Data Storage
3. Protection Against Malware
4. Secure Authentication
5. Remote Disablement

Read our white paper on “Secure Processing in the Mobile Age” to learn how Appian’s BPM software platform delivers the cost-effective and secure entry to mobile IT that organizations need.

-Ben Farrell, Director, Corporate Communications

He says, “BPM in the recent past was a way you could get your task workers to work on a specific, single application. It was robotic. It was narrow. It was targeted. It was not a knowledge enterprise.”

But things have changed. Mobile, Cloud and Social BPM software have opened a new world of value for the enterprise.

Appian has been aiming for the Mobile Process Enterprise since the day we started. Now we’ve created the BPM software to achieve it. Now, process can unite the enterprise, overcome the fissures, expose untapped intelligence and drive a transformation in how organizations operate. It’s a big future. Watch the video to learn more.

-Ben Farrell, Director, Corporate Communications