Edward Hughes, Appian’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales, recently spoke with Lisa Valentine of FSOkx about the driving trends in BPM software and how they can help financial services institutions (FSIs) transform their businesses. FSO recently named Appian the premier vendor for BPM solutions in financial services in their 2011 Excellence Awards.

Mr. Hughes discussed how Appian allows financial firms to deliver innovative capabilities cost-effectively to any desktop or mobile device, and why FSIs should consider new BPM delivery methods.

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Tags: , Appian, BPM for Financial Services, BPM in the Cloud, Business Process Management, mobile BPM, Social, Social BPM

What do these three things have in common? I need to set the stage appropriately before I explain.

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Tags: , Appian, BPM, BPM software, Business Process Management

Last year, I blogged about our customer Pinnacle People, and how they are using Appian for BPM-based case management to help unemployed people in the U.K. get back to work. Pinnacle People will be presenting their case study as part of the IRM Business Process Management Conference Europe 2011, June 9-10 in London.

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Tags: , Appian, Army Knowledge Online, BPM for Case Management, Business Process Management, Case Management

When it comes to hiring in the public sector, the mobile and social revolutions present a great opportunity for federal agencies. Mobile BPM and social BPM provide a perfect on-ramp.

That insight comes from Appian CTO and co-founder Michael Beckley. Beckley was recently interviewed by Federal News Radio host Francis Rose, for an in-depth look at hiring challenges in the federal government. Federal HR professionals are excited about the opportunity BPM software presents to take their processes into mobile and social environments – without the burden of more bureaucracy, more overhead and the need to add more systems.

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Tags: , Appian, BPM for Government, BPM for Human Resource Management, Business Process Management and Government, Government 2.0, mobile BPM, Social BPM

FSO Knowledge Exchange held their “Financial Services Industry Transformation and Outsourcing Strategies Forum” last week in London. Appian was on-hand for the event because financial services institutions (FSIs) make up a large segment of our customer base, and our BPM software is all about achieving organizational transformation. So it was a natural fit.

Edward Hughes, our VP of Worldwide Sales, participated in a panel discussion on “Driving Process Excellence Through Innovative Platforms and Solutions.” He outlined the three crucial elements that FSIs must focus on to achieve business transformation: business and IT collaboration, customer service excellence, and hitting the ever-moving target of regulatory compliance.

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

Conventional wisdom says that government can’t attract the best talent and get new hires up-and-running quickly. Mountains of paperwork cause long delays. Lack of flexibility and visibility into the hiring/on-boarding process gets in the way of fulfilling critical hiring goals. The whole experience can be frustrating both for federal hiring teams and the people who wish to devote themselves to public service.

It doesn’t have to be this way, and BPM software can help. Come to tomorrow’s Human Capital Management Federal (HCMF) Recruitment & Talent Management Strategy Day to learn how.

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Tags: , Appian, BPM, BPM for Government, BPM for Human Resource Management, Business Process Management, Government 2.0

I love “ah hah!” moments.  Those are when you can literally see the light bulb going off over someone’s head.  I witnessed one of those last week while sitting in a conference room at a Fortune 500 company evaluating Appian’s Business Process Management software.  The people in the group were responsible for all accounting operations in the company, many managed through their financial shared services center.  They needed help addressing the unstructured work required to resolve exceptions stemming from financial operations processes such as order to pay, record to report, account reconciliation, and deductions management.  The number of people they had spending 100% of their time tracking down information to resolve exceptions was staggering.

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Tags: , Appian, BPM, Business Process Management, Deductions Management, Financial Operations

The day has finally arrived – Appian World 2011 starts today! We have a fantastic event planned, with loads of rich content from customers, analysts, partners and other BPM experts. With more than 525 people registered, this conference is the “place to be” for the next three days to learn about Mobile, Cloud and Social BPM.

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Tags: , Appian, Appian World 2011, BPM, BPM in the Cloud, Business Process Management, Cloud Computing, mobile BPM, SaaS BPM, software-as-a-service

I’m very excited about next week’s Appian World event.  As I write this, we have well over 450 people registered.  That means we have to start worrying about our capacity limit at the hotel – a great problem to have!

Everyone who attends will have an opportunity to participate in processes around the conference using our new Tempo social interface on their mobile devices.  We at Appian use Tempo to run our business and manage most of our internal processes.  I’ll confess that I’ve become a Tempo addict, checking it all the time to see what’s just happened in our company.  Most things posted on our feed happen automatically through integrations with other processes.  I love seeing notifications of new customers getting on-boarded and every new person registering for Appian World.  Having an organization that has the transparency Tempo brings allows us to be very agile.  For example, I noticed someone from a prospective customer registered for Appian World five minutes before we were to get on a conference call with their management team.  Knowing they registered allowed our team to quickly change topics and take action to accelerate our sales cycle.

There’s a lot of talk out there about how social technologies will impact business.  For example, I attended the recent Shared Services & Outsourcing Week show which had over 1,000 leaders of business process areas such as finance, IT, HR, and procurement in attendance.  One presenter ran an automated poll question, asking how many of these process management leaders already employ social media as part of their internal operations.  The answer: only four percent.  A follow up question asked how many expected to use social media five years from now.  Well over 50% of the audience said they did.  Based on this we should expect hyper growth for social media in shared services and process management areas. But just how do business leaders expect to use social media and what business benefits do they anticipate?  And what qualifies as “social media” in business?

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Tags: , Appian, Appian 6, Appian Cloud, Appian World 2011, BPM, BPM in the Cloud, BPM software, Business Process Management, Cloud Computing, Deductions Management, Financial exception processes, Financial Operations, mobile BPM, Process Management, SaaS BPM, shared services

As seen in the classified ad section of a recent industry publication:

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Vibrant, fast-growing financial shared-services center for a multi-billion dollar company seeks Business Process Management Software (BPM) solution to track and manage exceptions to common accounting operations processes such as month-end close, deductions management in accounts receivables, and mismatches in accounts payable.  Feeling jilted by our ERP product which offers limited help.  Friends arranged blind dates with “bolt-on” products that all sounded great on paper, but had insufficient flexibility for our needs (which usually became clear even before our entrees were served).  All other past relationships in this area have gone sour.  Eager to find a “life partner” and ready for full commitment.

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Tags: , Accounts payable automation, Appian, BPM, BPM in the Cloud, Business Process Management, Deductions Management, Financial exception processes