Appian Forum: Wrap-up

Samir Gulati returned for a brief wrap-up of today’s event before we headed for cocktails and the technology showcase, with Malcolm Ross describing the technical sessions that will be held over at Appian headquarters tomorrow, and Matt Calkins thanking us all for being here. There are sessions tomorrow targeted primarily at their customers, including one-on-one … Continue reading “Appian Forum: Wrap-up”

Appian Forum: Mercer

Chris Gardner, VP of Development at Mercer (who provide HR consulting, HR outsourcing and investment management services), presented the last session of the day; Mercer Outsourcing, with which he is affiliated, provides HR benefits administration. They rolled out their first 3 processes in April of this year, with the BPM projects involving IT, their operational … Continue reading “Appian Forum: Mercer”

Appian Forum: Accelerating BPM Adoption Through An Integrated Business Framework

I skipped out on the breakout sessions this afternoon, but am back here for Michael Melenovsky — formerly with Gartner, now senior BPM leader at Satyam — discussing how to accelerate BPM adoption through an integrated business framework: more of a methodology framework than a code framework, however. He listed the three ways in which … Continue reading “Appian Forum: Accelerating BPM Adoption Through An Integrated Business Framework”

Appian Forum: AGF

John Jarrett, director of BPM at AGF Trust, spoke next about their Appian implementation; they’re the trust subsidiary of AGF Management Limited, a mutual funds company in Canada — very familiar territory for me, since the system integration company that I used to run implemented about half of the mutual funds imaging and workflow systems … Continue reading “Appian Forum: AGF”

Appian Forum: MEGA Partnership

Terry Lee, MEGA’s VP of North American operations, gave us an overview of MEGA, both in terms of their business process analysis and enterprise architecture capabilities. He stated the real reason for using a BPA tool, rather than just the modeling environment within the BPMS, is the ability to analyze the processes within a larger … Continue reading “Appian Forum: MEGA Partnership”

Appian Forum: Enterprise Rent-A-Car

Pat Steinmann and Dion Beuckman of Enterprise Rent-A-Car presented on their Appian implementation; I didn’t realize that not only are they the largest rental car company in North America, but are family-owned. Steinmann is from corporate IT, and Beuckman is with an operating unit in southern California, and they talked about two independent implementations of … Continue reading “Appian Forum: Enterprise Rent-A-Car”

Appian Forum: Archstone

The next presentation was from David Carpenter, Director of BPM at Archstone, a residential apartment investor and operator with about 2,600 employees. One of their main challenges was a high employee turnover rate, and the necessity to reduce the learning curve for new people. They wanted to move away from paper-based forms and manual workflow … Continue reading “Appian Forum: Archstone”

Appian Forum: Product Update from Malcolm Ross

Malcolm Ross, Director of Product Management and someone who I once referred to as an über demo god, gave us an update on the Appian product. He started with their product development philosophy: flexibility ease of use comprehensive build for the future, which is how they position their web-based AJAX process modeler, in contrast with … Continue reading “Appian Forum: Product Update from Malcolm Ross”

Appian Forum: Nokia Siemens

Nick Deacon, Global Head of BPM for consulting and systems integration within Nokia Siemens Networks, a global network communications services firm. The consulting and systems integration group, with a staff of 3,500-4000 and annual sales of 400M Euro, has the usual problems of managing a workforce of service providers, and were looking for a BPM … Continue reading “Appian Forum: Nokia Siemens”

Appian Forum: Matt Calkins

Appian’s CEO was up for the only vendor executive presentation of the conference, to discuss Appian and its community of customers and partners. As a somewhat late entrant to the BPM market, they had only about 15 customers in 2004 growing to almost 80 (active) customers in 2007, and expanded from a primarily government focus … Continue reading “Appian Forum: Matt Calkins”