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April 18, 2007Appian Enterprise 5.5: BPM Via Your iPod? Podcast: BPM Via Your iPod? A Review of Appian Enterprise 5.5
Guest: Phil Larson, Appian Corporation
Listen to the entire 16:09 podcast Download file
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Prefer reading to listening? Download a complete transcript of the podcast here.
Download a free White Paper: "Process Innovation and Corporate Agility: Balancing Efficiency and in a Knowledge-Centric World" (By Derek Miers, BPM Focus) Learn more at Appian's |
BPM has busted the buzzword meter to become a driving force behind integration -- and the question now is how to effectively extend its use it to enable corporate agility.
“We envision a world in which people can reroute work or escalate tasks via voice commands from their cell phones or even kick off processes from their iPods,” said Phil Larson, Appian Corporation’s Director of Product management.While iPod control has yet to arrive, Larson did detail a wide array of business imperatives, specific customer requests, emerging standards and Web 2.0 technologies that were built into Appian’s January release of Appian Enterprise 5.5.
“It provides a modern tool that’s easy to use, and we provide a 100% Web-based platform that’s using the latest AJAX and Web 2.0 technologies,” Larson noted. “So everything from process and task management to the design and modification of processes and policies can be done by a business user rather than strictly IT, and it can be done entirely through a Web browser.”
Some of the 230 customer feature requests incorporated into 5.5 included enhancements to Appian’s patent-pending in-flight modification technology that allows organizations to adjust their applications and processes while they run.
“This enables a level of corporate agility vastly greater than when the world was dominated by kind of older, rigid applications like CRM and ERP that really kind of just hard-wired logic into application code itself,” Larson said. “Now, problems no longer need to be handled manually; the visibility into process performance is increasing and becoming the norm, not the exception. “
The SOA Link
“From an SOA perspective, more and more as organizations are trying to expose more and more of their underlying systems as reusable services and this becomes an opportunity for us as a BPM company,” noted Larson, who added that Appian has had a lot of success as a platform for tying these services together into composite applications by combining the services – oftentimes Web Services -- with rules, procedures, monitoring capabilities, and human workflow.
And that has made it easier for organizations to get value out of their SOA by incorporating these services into enterprise processes,” Larson noted.
Spanning the Globe
Appian’s web-based design facilitates follow-the-sun models of development and customer support as organizations’ processes extend beyond the borders of the firm and home nations to suppliers, to their partners and their customers.
“BPM tools need to be Web-based to manage these external processes; they must extend as far as these processes do,” Larson noted. “Language and time zone support are essential to complex, global processes. So we’ve incorporated things like Unicode, support for Asian languages and multiple calendars. At the click of a button I can convert the entire product to a mirror image so people can read from right to left for languages like such as Arabic for instance. So these internationalization capabilities are key decision criteria for companies that are, or would like to be, players in the emerging global economy.
Web 2.0's Role
Finally, Web 2.0 technologies such as social networking sites, wikis, and RSS are entering the business world, and Larson detailed how enhanced collaboration and knowledge sharing can help companies sense and adapt to change.
“We intend to continue to evolve new and better ways for users to seamlessly interact with the process engine through mediums like e-mail, instant messaging, text messaging and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) for instance,” Larson said.
“Basically, any medium people are currently using to communicate with others is ripe with opportunity for creating seamless inroads into tools like Business Process Management,” he added.
Standards and More
Standards, however, “are very important but are in varying levels of maturity. Business Process Modeling Notation, for instance – BPMN -- is fairly well accepted, and Appian has fully embraced it,” Larson said.
“For instance, business analysts don't simply throw requirements over the wall for IT to translate into automated solutions -- they define abstract process flows by linking together tasks and activities. But unlike a static diagram like Visio, these same models actually govern the execution of the process,” Larson added.
“So the business analysts are actually building the application themselves. And moreover, when it’s appropriate, the business analysts can even retain the ability to modify and optimize these processes directly. This is fundamentally changing the way the business is managed and how operational processes are executed and it’s really helping bridge the business-IT divide," Larson noted.
For many companies, competition has never been more fierce. So using standards like BPMN to put business users back in the driver's seat of corporate strategy is an incredibly good thing.
Larson also detailed how other technologies relevant to BPM such as rules engines, content management and portal technologies were handled – along with the role of WS-*, or Web service standards, WSDL, UDDI and XML.
“They’re slightly less mature than some others, so our approach has been to support these standards but not be limited or constrained by their immaturity when providing solutions for our customers,” he said.
Larson went on to describe many more ways BPM can enable corporate agility – and more ideal attributes of a BPM system.
"This gives enterprise applications built on BPM the best of both worlds: first, the ability to encapsulate best practices and ensure things are working the way they’re supposed to, and second, the flexibility to adapt these models and changing requirements and unforeseen or unexpected exceptions,” he concluded.
To hear a more detailed context – and many more concepts – you can listen to the entire 16:08 podcast or read the full text transcript.
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