Welcome to Day 3 of Appian World 2013! After a fabulous customer celebration party last night with plenty of food, fun, and Appian-tinis, attendees are back at the Ronald Reagan Building this morning for a full day of more customer case studies, analyst presentations, and panel discussions. Clay Richardson, Principal Analyst at Forrester and an Appian World favorite, kicked things off with “Design for Disruption: Take an Outside-In Approach to BPM.”

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Tags: , Appian World 2013 liveblog, Forrester

Derek Miers from Forrester Research, delivered the final presentation of the day. He offered a powerful look at transforming an organization. This session was geared to help attendees understand and overcome the challenges associated with developing the long term vision for process improvement, how they can connect it to the customer experience by developing a target operating model for their organization, and then how they can engage their employees around that future. It outlined how to approach the program of change and build a compelling roadmap to which all stakeholders can commit.

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Tags: , Appian World 2013 liveblog, Forrester, worksocial

Last week’s Forrester Forum in Orlando started off with a thought-provoking bang. Forrester VPs Kyle McNabb and James McQuivey delivered a one-two punch on the nature of digital disruption (the conference theme), and its implications for business. The key take-away: embracing digital disruption is an opportunity find fundamentally new ways of doing business. That’s what Appian customers are doing with our worksocial technology.

Kyle gave the set-up: digital disruption is changing the IT landscape through new software-powered digital capabilities (i.e., Social and Mobile). It is destructive to legacy applications and processes. It is not a trend or a fad, because society as a whole has embraced it. It is changing IT from being “supportive of the business” to being “the fabric of business itself.”

James delivered the knock-out: we always talk about technology adoption, the point being that “adopters of new technology do old things in new ways.” Digital disruption, instead, requires technology “internalization” to spark entirely new ways of thinking about what modern business can be.

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Tags: , Forrester, mobile BPM, Social BPM, Social Business Software, worksocial

If Forrester Research CEO George Colony is correct, we are in the midst of a titanic shift. Since early last year, Mr. Colony has been talking about the rise of the App Internet. Some have interpreted this as yet-another “death of the Internet” theory, but what Mr. Colony is actually talking about is the demise of the browser-driven World Wide Web presentation layer that sits on top of the Internet plumbing (the underlying ”series of tubes” to use then-U.S. Sentaor Ted Stevens’ much-ridiculed, but not entirely innaccurate analogy).

There are many very smart people who disagree with Mr. Colony’s prediction (you can read a very cogent counter-argument here), but I find it compelling. It is also closely aligned with Appian’s “worksocial” vision – a vision that includes solutions to some of the arguments against the App Internet.

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Tags: , enterprise mobility, Forrester, mobile BPM, Social BPM, social technology, the app internet, worksocial

Clay Richardson from Forrester Research is a proponent of tackling and structuring big data with big process. In a recent blog post and in his riveting keynote presentation at Appian World 2012, Richardson discussed the four cornerstones to successfully tackle and implement big process across the enterprise by:

• Transforming the customer experience with mobile and operational processes
• Embracing and anticipating chaos with dynamic case management
• Combining and applying the process context to big data to drive transformation
• Leveraging cloud to accelerate application delivery and minimize risks

Clay Richardson from Forrester at Appian World 2012

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Tags: , Appian World 2012, BPM, Cloud, customer experience, Forrester, partner

Welcome to Day 2 of Appian World 2012! Yesterday we had some fantastic presentations, ranging from the basics of social BPM to the nuances of expanding your BPM implementation. Today’s presentations include a preview of Appian 7, keynotes from Forrester and MWD Advisors, and numerous customer panels. We’ll be live-blogging again, so be sure to check back throughout the day or follow our Twitter feed.

Today got off to a great start with a keynote presentation from Clay Richardson of Forrester, discussing “Taming Big Process.”
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The insurance industry is at the forefront in understanding the need for process improvement. At the same time, insurance is an industry particularly hampered by aging, brittle and burdensome IT systems. Hear what Forrester Research thinks insurance companies need to know in a one-hour webinar on Thursday, February 16 at 11:00am EST. Ellen Carney, Forrester Research Senior Analyst and insurance industry expert, will be our guest for “Fueling Insurance Provider Success with BPM.” Click the link to register today.

The webinar is co-sponsored by Appian’s insurance solution partner, MajeskoMastek. MajescoMastek has teamed with Appian around a series of templates and frameworks to accelerate implementation of crucial BPM for Insurance solutions.

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Tags: , BPM for Insurance, Forrester, MajeskoMastek, process improvement for insurance

There’s nothing like an initial public offering (IPO) to get people to sit up and notice a company.  IPOs are only possible when companies are delivering novel solutions that offer great value and facilitate strong revenue growth.  That’s the case with Guidewire, a software company that’s built enterprise applications to support the core systems of property & casualty (P&C) insurers.

But a closer inspection of Guidewire, made possible through their IPO regulatory filings, shows their solutions are novel only in comparison to the ancient IT systems and paper-based processes used extensively by P&C insurers today.  Guidewire is a big advance over those, but only a few steps in the BPM direction.

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Tags: , Appian, BPM for Insurance, Business Process Management, Forrester

Forrester analyst Craig Le Clair has published an excellent report called “Stuck In Cement: When Packaged Apps Create Barriers To Innovation.” In his related blog post, he frets that “concrete” is the more apt, but less poetic analogy. Based on the research findings, I suggest “Packaged Apps Are the Concrete Shoes Pulling Business Down.” That’s how dire a picture Craig paints, but he offers a ray of hope by positing that BPM Software is the answer.

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Tags: , application development, BPM software, Enterprise Resource Planning, Forrester, mobile BPM, Social, Social BPM

Discussions around customer service strategies have shifted from “customer management” to “customer engagement.” A recent piece in InformationWeek on  “Seven Ways IT Can Improve Customer Service” highlights this shift. The article, by Forrester Research senior analyst Kate Leggett, pays a lot of attention to process improvement and process consistency. Kate is a leading expert on customer service strategies, and a member of Forrester’s Business Process team, so this comes as no surprise. What is a little surprising is that she didn’t call out Mobile BPM and Social BPM more directly in her analysis. These components of Appian’s BPM software are playing a huge roll in the strategies our customers are rolling out to engage with their customers.

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Tags: , Business Process Management, customer experience, Forrester, Informationweek, mobile BPM, Social, Social BPM