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Webinar Recap: The Transformative Power of Worksocial for Business

Cindy Cheng, ​Sr. Director of Marketing Communications, EMEA, Appian
August 20, 2012

As the recognized market leaderin modern BPM software with 3.5 million users worldwide, Appian knows how to deliver the technology and software applications to improve workforce productivity. While traditional enterprise backend systems are dominated by complex software applications like ERP and CRM, the number ofsocial business and collaboration technologieshave been sprawling like mushrooms. These technologies provide new ways for us to work, to be social, communicate, and interact with others. Yet these applications remain divided and separated, while tangible business value and return on investment varies widely.

This 'state of separation' between systems, departments, employees, and ultimately, between the organization and its customers and partners, creates enormous challenges for the enterprise. If employees cannot collaborate with the users of other systems, valuable insights are lost. When subject matter experts and employees with particular insight into a given issue are excluded from collaboration, poor business decisions and actions will be made.

Appian's worksocial platform combines a proven, scalable enterprise BPM suite with intuitive, collaborative social features. It is also natively available on all major mobile platforms and in the cloud. Besides automating and orchestrating key processes, a BPMsuite (BPMS) can help enforce business rules, introduce real-time visibility, integrate with systems, enforce accuracy and consistent execution. BPMS makes the work we do more efficient, more effective, and more intelligent. If the organization cannot providea consistent, high-quality customer experience due to the siloed nature of data and systems, customer churn increases and revenue decreases. What could be more critical for a business?

Furthermore, business processes provide the much needed context to make content and collaboration more meaningful.Most people have received an email or an invoice that lead to questions, not actions. Why was this sent to me? What am I suppose to do with this? Who can help me with this? Process provides context to addmeaning to that content, resulting in more effective collaboration for a faster resolution or more significant businessimpact. Content without context leads to confusion. Collaboration without context might as well be a waste of time as it's just empty chatter.

At Appian, we believe that social interfaces brings people together. Since the Appian social interface requires no training, extreme ease of use leads to mass participation and hence, better work. A recent IDC and McKinsey GlobalInstituteanalysis shows that effective use of social technologies have shown to add a 20 to 25% productivity improvement. Combining social technologies with BPM will yield an even higher productivity rate.

We have also seen how mobile brings people together. Enabling people to participate in processes and access systems from anywhere, and from a mobile device of their choice is powerful. Today's workforce is mobile and global. We should be able to work, access enterprise information and make businessdecisions anytime, anywhere.

Lastly, worksocial can solve theapplication sprawl problemby consolidating all existing and new enterprise applications on a single platform.Multiple new process applications can be created through code-free composition on the Appian platform.All existing applications across the organization can be integrated through the intuitive social interface.That means with Appian, a user can access and work with the events and data arising from every other software application. The end result is one simple interface that:

    • Surfaces all business events from all enterprise sources in a personalized feed

    • Allows an employee to view and take business action based on those events

    • Enables social business collaboration around those events

    • Is available on the desktop and all popular mobile devices

Let us show you how work and social are better together. If you missed the Transformative Power of Worksocial for Business webinar by Malcolm Ross, VP of Product Marketing at Appian, the replay is available here. You can also access Appian's worksocial platform in the cloud with a free 30-day trial.

Cindy Cheng,Director of Product Marketing