UPS’ IT Shared Services Group was named Winner in the category of Furthering BPM Disciplines.  UPS knew a standardized BPM platform would help in addressing a number of process and service challenges. Gartner points out that “while driving change for enhanced business value and alignment…the company achieved the needed results utilizing only internal resources without the aid of outside vendor professional services consultants.” I can’t think of a better testament to our claim that Appian is the easiest BPM suite on the market to use, deploy and adopt.

UPS uses Appian’s business process management software in support of a mandate from the company’s CIO to deliver better, faster service at reduced cost. With more than 100 process applications deployed, UPS has improved operational efficiencies, enhanced customer service excellence, and generated significant cost-savings. UPS will share its award-winning BPM expertise in a series of winner-user roundtables with conference attendees at the Gartner BPM Summit taking place April 27-29 at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront in Baltimore, Maryland.

Nokia Siemens Networks was named Runner Up in the category of Best Practices in Advancing BPM Competencies. Using Appian’s BPM software, NSN has deployed a sophisticated, pan-organizational BPM program driven by one of the most mature Center of Excellence organizations in the BPM industry. Appian drives process automation, process governance and consistency across the fundamental areas of NSN’s business, from its Business Solutions & Operations to its Managed Services and its Global Network Implementation Centers. The Appian platform has been leveraged to provide a multitude of applications that deliver millions of dollars in return on investment annually.

Congrats again to the BPM teams at UPS and NSN. If you want to learn more about either of these BPM software success stories, both customers are on the agenda for Appian World 2011. Register today for this free BPM industry event.

Ben Farrell, Director, Corporate Communications

Is your job turning into the IT janitor?

If you can answer “yes” to any of these questions, it might be the case.

1)       Are you more concerned about hardware performance than software use cases?

2)       Do you spend more time worrying about the “up-time” of your servers than the productivity of the employees who use those servers?

3)       Do you complain about how much disk-space users take up in their email and network drives?

IT systems management today is plumbing.  It’s like lights, telephones, and cleaning the garbage cans every night.  Business executives know they need it, but just expect this stuff to work and aren’t interested in the details.  And who can blame them, in tight economic times you need to focus on your core value.  If you’re in retail, that’s increasing sales;  Hotels, booking more rooms;  Airlines, filling seats on planes;  Banking, reducing risk and getting more customers;  Health care, healing patients; etc…  Few to none of these executive have  priorities that include tuning the memory performance on the web server. (Maybe there’s now more than one reason memory management is often called Garbage Collection).

The devaluing of those IT professionals that provide these skills is inevitable as applications move into the cloud.  Unless you happen to work for a cloud provider like Appian or Amazon Web Services, it is unlikely hardware and server management skills will be highly prized in your organization over the next 10 years.

Over the next decade, IT professionals must show value to executives by showing how new technologies can grow a company’s business.  IT professionals must share the same goals and objectives as the business executives and bring a unique technical viewpoint on how leading technologies can be applied.  As cloud offerings in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) become more widely adopted, the job of keeping the servers up and running will be managed by a 3rd party at a much lower cost.  The internal IT staff must refocus 100% of their time on applying technology towards business innovations.

So where to start your new IT career in technical business innovation?

Packaged SaaS solutions can be tempting but don’t really differentiate.  Traditional SaaS vendors like Salesforce.com have actually specialized in by-passing IT altogether and deliver packaged solutions directly to the business.  SaaS offerings can be great for quick fixes, but can deliver little in business differentiation as adoption of the same cookie-cutter solution extends across the market.

Cloud BPM and PaaS is where IT should focus.  BPM platforms like Appian delivered through the cloud, enable IT to put 100% of their effort on direct business process innovation.  Processes are often at the core of business innovation and the unique processes you build will differentiate the business in the marketplace.  Through simple web interfaces, process flows and interactions can be quickly modeled that join your customers, employees and systems into unique process patterns that drive cost savings and new customer acquisition.  Cloud BPM systems like Appian are further designed to grow with your business from small departmental processes to enterprise wide engagements with millions of process instances, removing the need of IT to worry about scaling servers, and instead focusing on scaling revenue.

Malcolm Ross, Director Product Management

These are one-day executive events for senior IT leaders at mid- to large-sized organizations in the private and public sectors. CIO Perspectives meetings always provide compelling, content-rich networking where CIOs and senior executives can collaborate on business and technology issues.

This time around, the focus will be on IT’s role in business growth and product innovation – very timely as we all look cautiously ahead to a return to economic stability and expansion. Mobile computing, cloud delivery and social collaboration technologies are also high on the agenda.

The CIO Perspectives Forums empower local CIOs to build sustainable professional communities, determine the most relevant conference content for their region, broaden the scope of their partner/supplier networks and update them on the latest technology solutions and services their businesses require.

Click here for more information on the Dallas event. Click here for the Atlanta event. Reference the promo code “APPIAN” to secure your complimentary spot.

Hope to see you there!

Ben Farrell, Director, Corporate Communications

As with previous Appian user conferences, the event is completely free to Appian customers, partners, and those simply interested in learning more about Appian and Business Process Management. Whether you are a business or IT professional, a process improvement expert or a BPM newbie, with a commercial organization or working in the public sector, this is a must-attend event.

At Appian World 2011, BPM industry luminaries and leading practitioners will share the insights you need to drive business value through process improvement. Analysts from firms such as Gartner and Forrester will discuss where the BPM market is today, where it is headed, and how BPM suite technology will support it. People on the front-lines of BPM use in government and commercial markets will share their success stories, lessons learned, and tricks of the trade. From the visionary to the practical, the speakers will help you understand how to make the most of a process improvement program, and how to drive maximum value from a BPM technology investment.

Appian World 2011 is also a one-stop shop for learning everything you need to know about the on-premise Appian BPM Suite and the SaaS BPM Appian Anywhere. Day 1 of the conference features multiple training tracks where you can get the basics through a BPM 101 tutorial, get hands-on with the latest Appian 6 platform, discuss BPM value measurement, learn about proven methodologies for program success, and more. The training continues on Day 3 with dedicated product and methodology tracks.

In between, the focus will be on industry experts and real-world case studies, with plenty of networking time with other participants and Appian executives. Approved Appian partners are invited to attend a comprehensive Partner Forum dedicated to enablement and success best-practices.

Early-bird registrants will receive a complimentary copy of Empowered, the new book by Josh Vernoff and Ted Schadler of Forrester Research, and can take advantage of discounted rates at the beautiful Hyatt Regency Reston.

Don’t miss out! Register for Appian World 2011 today.

-Ben Farrell, Director of Corporate Communications

As usual, ETM does a great job selecting topics that are meaningful to today’s IT professionals and gathering insights from experts across the industry.  You can click on the podcast link and register to download and listen to this informative roundtable discussion.

Malcolm Ross

Director Product Management

We certainly live in exciting times in the BPM industry.  We have seen dramatic consolidation in the industry as well as dramatic growth in adoption of BPM platforms.  If you are an IT professional, and not up-to-speed yet on BPM, I encourage you to listen to the podcast and start your research in how your role will be changing over the next several years.   The future is all about alignment of IT/Business for a common “Shared Purpose”, agile development, SaaS and Cloud offerings, and using a common tool to jointly model and manage your enterprise processes and applications.

To listen to this podcast, follow the link to the ETM website and register.  ETM additionally offers a variety of other great resources to learn about trends in the IT and BPM industry.

Malcolm Ross, Director Product Management, Appian

Gartner issued a press release from the show outlining the “Nine Most Contentious IT Issues for the Next Two Years.” Almost all of them are directly related to process control and improvement within IT. Whether talking about business expectations that have outstripped IT capacity, infrastructure and application modernization, or accountability and risk management, it comes down to process: 

• Automation and the ability to make better resource allocation decisions based on process performance mean more productivity for short-staffed IT teams
• BPM-based composite Web applications mean new life and increased value from legacy systems
• Documented policy enforcement and audit trails mean more accountability and reduced risk

Gartner names BPM specifically as one of three core disciplines IT must master (along with Enterprise Architecture and Service Management) to minimize turf wars, align viewpoints and “provide the architectural guidance required to build solutions.” To foster and support a process-oriented culture, Gartner talks about creating Business Process Competency Centers, also called Centers of Excellence (COE). This is absolutely in keeping with what we have seen with our customers, and it is why we have created services packages including our own BPM Center of Excellence that puts customers on the fast-track to success, facilitates knowledge transfer to make customers BPM self-sufficient, and helps them develop their own on-going BPM COE.

We want to help IT leaders get a jump-start on using BPM to overcome their “contentious issues.” To that end, we’re offering a webinar on BPM for IT called “Improve Your Processes. Control Your Destiny,” where some of our IT customers will discuss their BPM successes. Follow this link to register, and while you’re there, take a look at some of the BPM for IT case studies we have collected.

Don’t delay, because as the Gartner press release concludes, “IT leaders should use this time, before obtaining new post financial crisis direction from CEOs, to resolve these issues. . . Resolving these issues will place IT leaders in a far better position to take on the challenges of the new future that lies ahead.”

Ben Farrell

Director of Corporate Communications