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Digital Transformation: Winning the Race for Digital Consumers

Roland Alston, Appian
September 2, 2016

Usain Bolt is the fastest man on the planet.

In Rio, Bolt breezed to gold medals in the 100m, 200m, and 4x100m sprints. Hetransformed the sprint game with effortless speed.

Likewise,digital transformation has transformed the development process for enterprise apps. The latest digital low-code mobile developmentplatformsare more responsive than ever. Allow you to build and deploy enterprise-grade applications 10x faster. These high-octane platforms arelike jet fuel for back-office business processes and workflowmanagement.

They are powerful enough to manage thousands of data points for enterprise-grade applications. But, at the same time, theyare so user-friendly, evennon-tech business users canquickly turn new ideas into innovation...in the form of working business apps.

Here's why this kind of digital speed matters. In the hyper-connected digital economy, consumer expectations are rising faster than ever. Your customers and constituents want faster response times, more personalized interactions with your brand, more control of the customer experience.

If these expectations aren't met, don't be fooled...consumers will defect at the drop of a hat. Over half will abandon their online purchases if they can't find quick answers to their questions, according to Forrester.

On the other hand, if you want to keep pace with customer expectations, conventional mobile developmentplatforms just won't cut it. Nope, you're much better off with a low-code solution like the Appian Platform. Here's what reviewers at PC Magazine had to say about it:

"...Appian was the most mature, easiest to use low-code platform we tested for creating..."

PC Magazinealso described the combination of Appian'sQuick Appsfeature and the full-fledged Appian Designer as "...a potent duo in creating an app quickly and then layering customization and added features on top."

In a face-off with other popular platforms, PC Magazinealso noted that Quick Appsis user-friendly, primarily form-based, and the full Designer lets you map out all the data and objects in the app with the drag-and-drop Appian Process Modeler. For more complex cases, youcan also customize apps with dynamic rules, automated decisioning, and system integrations.

It's also worth noting what Gartner had to say about the speed and intuitive design of the Appian Platform, in its latest Magic Quadrant report:

"...Appian's differentiation comes from its social centricity, allowing rapid innovation and discovery, as well as ad hoc and improvisational collaboration between customers, workers, partners and suppliers. ...Appian customer references indicated a higher degree of satisfaction with the Appian platform, compared with other vendors surveyed. This finding underscores Appian's reputation as a very business-user-friendly iBPMS. ...Appian customer references reported a median-time-to-production implementation of less than three months, the lowest of any vendor surveyedÖ"

"We've always had a focus on generating this kind of low-code, easy-to-design environment that's still powerful enough to meet the demand of enterprises," said Malcolm Ross, Vice President of Product Marketing at Appian. "Quick Apps is an acceleration of that. It's designed to allow a business user with no IT skills whatsoever to walk through a simple four-step design wizard to define the processes, interfaces, and data structures of an app, and who they want to work with for loosely structured collaboration, with ad hoc processes and tasks."

With remarkable speed and responsiveness, the best low-code digital transformation platforms allow you to create fully functioning enterprise-grade, web or mobile apps. Without typing a single line of code.

Which is effortless. Like the way Usain Bolt worked his magic in the 100 meter Olympic finals, breezing past competitors with enough room to spare, that he was able to give the timing clock a glance, as he zoomed through the finish line.

But here's the question: Is your mobile app development platform this responsive? This fast?

Does it have the power, the flexibility, the speed to breezeahead of customer expectations and stay there?

Roland Alston