Today Appian launched v6 of its BPMS offering, and at the same time announced it would boost its online BPM community (Appian FORUM) and also deliver additional consulting and training services focused on helping customers increase the scope and maturity of their BPM efforts.
The central theme for all these announcements is “accelerating process improvement”. The highly-integrated nature of Appian’s BPM suite and the unique nature of its tooling has always meant that it can deliver results quickly to customers wanting to take advantage of an integrated platform, but this is the first time that the company has explicitly made time-to-delivery a central part of its positioning.
The main focuses for improvement in Appian 6 are threefold:
- The design tools – better support for multi-user collaborative process design and development, and integration with the Appian Forum environment for import, export and sharing of process application assets.
- The participant user interface framework – more interactive user experiences, built using Google’s Web Toolkit; and richer role-based dashboards for different stakeholder groups.
- A redesigned reporting engine, based on an in-memory database and allowing more flexible, real-time analytics and reporting by managers and analysts.
The newly-launched Appian FORUM is an online catalogue of freely-available (to Appian customers) BPM project assets (including process templates, code libraries and adapters, form definitions, rules, and so on) submitted by Appian staff, customers and partners. It’s integrated with Appian Access, the pre-existing online knowledge community for Appian customers.
In Appian’s own words the BPM Framework brings together “methodology, roles, skills, and training required for BPM success, mapped against a BPM Maturity Model”. Training is delivered through the Appian Academy education programmes.
This is very welcome. BPM vendors should be delivering this kind of offering, because delivering BPM success is hard – it’s not simply a matter of buying some tools and letting customers “have a go”. One thing that enterprises I speak to appreciate is the ability to get quick “boosts” to help them with their work that are tuned to their own level of maturity and the problems at hand.
You can find out more about what we think about Appian’s offering in this Guest Pass report, though please note that our assessment doesn’t currently cover Appian 6 (we should have that published by the end of the year). Our BPM advisory service customers can use our online interactive comparison tool to see how Appian stacks up against other vendors in particular scenarios. You can find out more about our BPM advisory service here.
[...] more information in a release from MWD, a pretty reliable source of information in the BPM market. The main point of emphasis [...]