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Investor's Business Daily Takes Stock of Worksocial: Social Business Software

Ben Farrell
November 27, 2012

"Disconnected is no way to work. While social and mobile technologies inch into the workplace, leading firms push for mile-wide advances."

So says Investor's Business Daily's Sonja Carberry in a piece from last week's edition called "Social, Mobile Tools Close Business Gaps; Get Connected." Ms. Carberry spoke with a number of social/mobile enterprise visionaries for their tips on getting the most business value from - and executive support for - the consumerization of IT. Her top three insights come from Appian CEO Matt Calkins. They discussed the ways Appian customers are using our worksocial platform to embrace a new world of IT and business possibilities using social business software.

As a good journalist, Ms. Carberry knows not to bury the lede, so she starts with the most fundamental piece of advice: "Welcome the convergence." Getting the most from social and mobile in the enterprise is as much about attitude as it is about technology (if not more). This is because the consumerization of IT isn't about "doing old things better." It is about finding fundamentally new ways to run your business and deliver value. For years, business leaders have been urged to evolve beyond the "internal-to-outside-world" way of thinking. Some have done it better than others. What we see in Appian's customer base is that companies that think "Outside-In" better-appreciate what social and mobile (and cloud, and more) can really do for their business and their value-chain experience. It's like I heard at the recent Forrester Forum on Digital Disruption in the enterprise: Digital disruption shouldn't be "adopted" - it needs to be "internalized."

Matt puts it very succinctly in the IBD piece: "Companies can accommodate or capitalize."

Whatever your decision, once you've committed, you've got to get people to the party. There's nothing more lonely than an empty social feed. Ms. Carberry terms it "Open the forum."But it requires more than just inviting people to participate in a feed. One of the reasons worksocial excels at driving social business value is that it auto-populates that feed with tailored data and events that are crucial for helping an employee do his or her job. People are actually compelled to use an Appian event feed because it gives them something they need regardless of whether they ever actually enter into a social collaboration. It gives them a single, easy to use interface for taking the business actions they need to take, regardless of which underlying applications are involved.

There's plenty more useful and digestible advice in the story. If it piques your interest to explore these ideas further, Appian World 2013 is the perfect opportunity. Register today to attend the premier "BPM + Mobile + Social + Cloud" industry event, April 29-May 1, 2013 in Washington DC.

Ben Farrell

Director of Corporate Communications

Ben Farrell