Service Desk, Project Governance and Business Continuity Get Process Automation with Integrated Mobile Access and Social Collaboration

RESTON, Va.–January 7, 2013– Appian, the the market leader in modern business process management (BPM) software, today announced that the State of Ohio Office of Budget and Management (OBM) has deployed three major process applications in under 9 months on Appian Cloud. Appian’s combination of process automation, native mobile app access and a social business interface supports OBM’s officially-stated goal to reengineer business processes and leverage technology to increase efficiency and effectiveness of services.

The first three Appian applications deployed cover management of OBM’s service desk, agency project governance and business continuity planning and support. All three represent modern, evolved versions of formerly manually-intensive, opaque agency processes. Using the Appian platform, these core processes have been automated and optimized for greater performance, participation, visibility and speed. Appian’s established expertise in business process improvement and automation has streamlined process hand-offs, improved process status visibility for system users, enforced policies and delivered tangible metrics on business process performance. Appian’s innovative worksocial capabilities have made OBM’s enterprise processes, and related data, accessible and actionable via any mobile device through a zero-training social interface that automatically surfaces crucial relevant human and system events.

“My objective as CIO is to put innovative, high-value functionality in business users’ hands quickly, and developing on Appian in the cloud is key to that,” said Raj Subramanian, chief information officer, State of Ohio OBM. “With Appian’s drag-and-drop design and automatic native mobility in an Agile development environment, we can get better business/IT collaboration and accelerate deployment times.”

For example, the OBM Service Desk was initially envisioned for IT Service Management only. Early in development, Subramanian and his team realized they could extend it to manage all types of requests including HR, Finance, Legal, Communications, Training, and other services. Within 3 months, OBM was able to provide a single and clear avenue for requesting all services that is consistently tracked, visible to all participants, and available on the desktop, iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry and Android devices. The Business Continuity application makes all procedures, information and needed documents clear and available for OBM employees in the event of disasters, power outages, etc.

“It only makes sense that processes and data employees need if they can’t get to the office should be accessible on a mobile device,” continued Subramanian. “The fact is, though, that by default now, everything we build is mobile-enabled.”

“Forward-thinking agencies at all levels of government are looking to bring the best of IT consumerization into their organizations,” said Matt Calkins, president and CEO of Appian. “Appian’s worksocial platform does that by bringing a work context into the social and mobile world.”