The Federal Bureau of Investigation launched its new case management system, called Sentinel, last month. Sentinel moves the agency off of paper files and into the 21st Century world of electronically stored and shared case information. This should be good news – and it is, to a degree. Sentinel will make it easier for agency agents to do their jobs, track vital case information, and share that information with other law enforcement and national defense organizations.

Now here’s the bad news (and it’s really bad): The system took a total of 12 years and more than $600 million to complete. These numbers, reported in the Wall Street Journal, include the more than three years and roughly $170 million spent on an earlier digital project called Trilogy that never produced a useable case management system.

What an outrageous waste of time and taxpayer dollars! We the People deserve better, plain and simple. And the fact is, we could have better – better government agency performance supported by better government IT, delivered more quickly and at a fraction of the cost of traditional development approaches – if more agency IT teams would embrace business process management software. The most forward-thinking agencies have already paved the way and proved the value.

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Tags: , application development, BPM for Government, Case Management, Government 2.0, mobile BPM, Social BPM

The final keynote presentation of Appian World 2012 was given by Neil Ward-Dutton from MWD Advisors. He presented “The New Way We Work: Towards Adaptive Case Management.” Ward-Dutton opened his presentation by stating that the nature of work is changing radically. There are three big challenges affecting businesses today: globalization – “connectedness” is driving sophisticated value chains; transparency – industry regulations, consumer pressure and competition are driving openness; and smart, connected markets – customers see the “online world” as the natural place to look for information and services.

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Tags: , Appian World 2012, Case Management, MWD Advisors

Once again, attendees at Appian World 2012 split up into three tracks – beginner, developer and business. Developers are learning about best practices in mobile BPM from Appian’s Christine Hutchison. Beginners are enjoying a Government Solutions Panel featuring US Marine Corps, Horizon Industries, Collabralink, and Amazon Web Services. For the business track, Tim Clarke, head of applications for Benenden Healthcare Society, presented on Self-Service Case Management.
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Tags: , Appian World 2012, Benenden Healthcare Society, Case Management

BPTrends has just published a great thought-piece from Macedon Consulting, Inc. founder Austin Rosenfeld. Austin examines BPM Software in the context of the continuum of structured to unstructured processes that we see in real-world business. For example, manufacturing processes focus on high repeatability in order to produce millions of identical widgets. These processes are highly structured, with every step – including possible exceptions – mapped out in a BPMN process diagram. At the other end of the spectrum, Austin describes the process scenario for a hotel concierge. This tends to be a very loosely structured stream of independent requests across a relatively unconstrained domain of content, and requiring a high – but unpredictable – level of consultative knowledge work.

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Tags: , Business Process Management, Case Management, Social, Social BPM, unstrucutred processes

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

Appian is hosting the “BPM Just Got Better” webinar on February 22 at 11:00am Eastern Time. In less than one hour, you will learn how to leverage BPM, cloud technology, social collaboration and mobility to drive market success.

Forrester Research Vice President Connie Moore will outline the new technology imperatives for process improvement, and how industry leaders are using them to drive value. She will also pay special attention to the emerging model of BPM for Case Management, using research from Forrester’s new Dynamic Case Management Wave 2011 report to show how next-generation BPM supports unstructured processes and unexpected business events.

After February 22, this webinar will be available on-demand.

Ben Farrell, Director, Corporate Communications

Tags: , Appian, Appian 6, BPM, BPM for Case Management, BPM in the Cloud, Business Process Management, Case Management, Cloud Computing, Forrester, mobile BPM, SaaS BPM, software-as-a-service

Chris Dorobek of Federal News Radio recently interviewed Appian VP of Marketing Samir Gulati about the increased use of business process management software in federal agencies, and the financial and operational benefits of using BPM in a cloud environment.

In the past, federal agencies have created “point-solution” BPM applications for proof of concept, Gulati said. Now, these organizations are using the technology as a broader platform agency-wide for process and case management. The FDA is implementing BPM for everything from CIO-level reporting to tracking new medicines and food additives. Another example, recently discussed in this blog and in Washington Technology, is the Treasury Department’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which has multiple mission-critical BPM projects in place.

BPM in the cloud is also taking off in government circles, Gulati added. The Department of Education recently granted Appian an Authority to Operate a hosted BPM application delivered through Amazon Web Services. Cloud benefits include a greatly reduced total cost of ownership, and faster time to value, he said. Agencies don’t have to install equipment on premises, software is readily hosted and accessed through the cloud, there is no need to deploy servers or maintain applications, and upgrades are received free without the need for involvement from agency personnel.

 When using BPM in the federal sector, Gulati added, agencies have to iterate and constantly improve processes in response to the changing regulatory landscape. Rules and regulations must be built into processes to comply with changing compliance requirements in the federal marketplace.

 “Great processes are evolved, not invented,” Gulati noted.

Tags: , Amazon Web Services, Appian, BPM for Case Management, BPM in the Cloud, BPM software, Business Process Management, Business Process Management and Government, Case Management, Cloud Computing, FDA, Government 2.0, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Process Improvement for Government, Process Management, software-as-a-service

Research firm IDC has published a very interesting case study on how solution vendor psHEALTH is using BPM in the cloud to drive rapid development of custom solutions for healthcare providers in the UK. There is increasing awareness of how organizations are using BPM to speed internal application development – particularly via the cloud. IDC’s paper is particularly interesting because it highlights a new and growing trend of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) leveraging a BPM Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for accelerated solution deployment to their customers. More »

Tags: , Appian, Appian Cloud, application development, BPM, BPM in the Cloud, Business Process Management, Case Management, IDC, OEM, psHealth, SaaS BPM

We have talked quite a lot about Dynamic Case Management (DCM) in this blog. But I want to take a brief step back from the academic and technical discussions, because I have been struck by how often “case” actually means “person.” It means patients in medical and healthcare; students and teachers in education; plaintiffs and defendants in legal; voter constituents in government; and the list goes on.

I don’t want to get too “touchy-feely,” but it does seem that in this context, DCM technologies offer something more intrinsically valuable than other enterprise IT. In these sorts of scenarios, case management is fundamentally about how well an individual is treated, cared for or supported during what can be very important – and very trying – personal experiences.

A fantastic example of this is how Pinnacle People is using BPM-based case management to help unemployed people in the U.K. get back to work. More »

Tags: , Appian, Appian 6, BPM, Business Process Management, Case Management, MWD Advisors, Pinnacle People

It’s great to see all the discussion on Case Management.  As Craig Le Clair and Connie Moore from Forrester put it last December, this truly is an Old Idea that is Catching New Fire.  Not many people would have predicted that “Case Management” would have received this much discussion 2 years ago, but the rapid convergence of social “un-structured” work with business process management has forced many people to consider new flexible solutions.

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“.

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Tags: , BPM, Case Management, Forrester, psHealth