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Blue Slate Solutions had the opportunity this past week to attend the AppianWorld 2012 conference (April 15-18), targeted on the Appian product and more generally around BPM.  The Keynote speakers were great as well were the other presentations and breakout sessions.  The topics discussed in great length were, Social/Mobile BPM, Big Data, Big Process, and use of the Cloud.  These concepts were then all related back to how the Appian 7 platform will roll them  together into a seemless, easy to use enviornment.

Daryll Plummer from Gartner led off the conference with a presentation Delivering Enterprise Performance Breakthroughs with BPM.  He delivered one of the most memorable quotes from the conference “Email is for old people”, while he explained how social and mobile interaction will lead businesses into the future of easy to use BPM on the go.  Businesses will be doing this by making use of features in BPM tools to slim down interfaces and provide a consistent feel across platforms (Apple, Android, PC, etc…) along with using the Cloud to provide flexibility in organizations that would otherwise have a hard time getting up and going with a product.

Big Data and Big Process was talked about by Clay Richardson in the Taming Big Process presentation that was put on the second day of the conference.  This presentation aligned with the way Blue Slate views the future of BPM where Data is becoming ever more important.  The thought that BPM is only process is starting to fade, BPM is taking on a new face, one being more tied to the data that is actually acted upon during a process.   This was also interesting as it is hard to tame big process and doing so can result in massive processes, in the presentation Clay pushed home the point of handling the exception, or otherwise a term deemed Case Management.  Using Case Management techniques the power can be put back into the users hands and they can control the process instead of being forced into something that does not work.

Matt Caulkins (CEO of Appian) and Malcom Ross (Vice President of Product Marketing at Appian) drove home how Appian 7 will help customers and clients tie all of these key concepts together.  The new version of the Appian product will sport a new and improved Social user interface that will limit the amount of customization, hence making the user interface more intuitive, easy to use, and save businesses money by cutting down on training costs.  Appian 7 also introduces a new concept called “Records”.  This ties back to the concept that Data is just as important as process, as anything that is acted upon is stored in a record which is then available for reporting..  Without going into too much detail, a record can be process data or even data from a disparate system which Appian has access to via a configured RDBMS (Relation Database Management System) connection.  The Appian 7 Product also sports a new reporting engine which will help businesses make use of all of this data they have as any data that is available in a record in Appian is potentially right at the finger tips of the reporting engine.