Appian Europe 2018 brought its A-game to London, with a jam-packed lineup of digital leaders and big thinkers on all things digital. Experts, customers and industry leaders gathered to talk about technology trends and the future of digital transformation.
The two-day summit attracted more than 500 attendees, which speaks to the growing trend of digitalization in the UK and Europe.
For those of you who couldn't make it to the Hilton London Bankside on Great Suffolk Street for this year's event, here's a highlight reel of day 2 action.
Product and Transformation
Appian Product Update: Malcolm Ross, VP, Product Marketing, Appian lead a deep dive into the new features and functionality of the latest Appian Product Update. Be sure to mark your calendars for November 16th when Appian 18.4 releases!
"Low Code isn't just about delivering solutions faster. It's about delivering feedback on how well you're accomplishing your digital business goals."
The Future Has Been Automated: Derek Miers, Research Director, Gartner, took us to school on the evolving role of business process management in digital transformation and innovation.
Side note: Rewind to 2008, and Miers was attending the very first Appian World at the Ritz Carlton in Virginia, when there were only 300 people in the audience. Today, he was speaking to a global audience at the first Appian Europe.
"There's a wall between initiating and scaling digital business."
According to a Gartner survey, organizations are building processes but not scaling them. The biggest barrier? Culture. This dovetails with Appian's recent Future of Work survey, which indicates that the biggest barrier to digital transformation is IT culture.
Miers' recommendation for enabling transformation? Practice on yourself. Gather stakeholders to test out your ideas and processes for greater engagement and change.
Digitalization in Banking
Strategic Transformation with Modern Banking Solutions: SimÛn Ergas, CEO, Santander Back Offices Globales Mayorista gave us a rundown of Santander's extraordinary success in using Appian's case management capabilities to modernize all of their back-end processes without compromising the bank's high security standards. It's also worth noting that Santander has deployed Appian globally to 100 million customers in Europe and the Americas.
Ergas says that the old model for banking is the "push model" -- banks as a product supermarket, selling to customers. The new model, says Ergas, is the "pull model." In other word, banks must be a service, and meet the client where they are.
Clients nowadays are financially savvy and demand more speed and transparency. Santander's approach to this new challenge?
- Leverage value-added knowledge by reducing time consumption in non-value activities
- Redesign service execution to meet and quickly adapt to client journey expectations
Reduce the Time to Yes: The theme of customer-oriented processes was common throughout Appian Europe.
Addiko Bank the only banking group to focus on South East Europe re-branded themselves as the "Straightforward Bank."
To meet their goals of simplicity and convenience, Addiko modernized their main distribution channels for retail and SME customers with express branches, digital capabilities, and revamped online/mobile banking.
Georg Kolin, Head of Group Customer Experience & Digitalization Group Corporate & SME Banking, revealed how Addiko combined Appian's Enterprise Low-Code Development capabilities with artificial intelligence and business process management to cut "Time-to-Yes" on loan requests from 7 days to less than a day, and Time to Cash from 4 weeks to 1-2 days.
"How many touch points does a [banking] customer have today for basic scenarios? How can we shorten it?"
Emerging Technologies
Appian Europe reached new heights with an amazing lineup of breakouts that went deep into the hottest digital trends, from RPA and machine learning to AI and intelligent automation:
Harnessing Automation to Reduce Manual Processes by 80%: In this session, Ingolv Urnes, Director & Co-Founder, psKINETIC revealed how his organization achieved safe, cost-effective, automation by combining Appian with machine learning and other technologies to improve patient outcomes, reduce manual processing by 80%, and overcome the regulatory challenges of GDPR. The value of 100% automation? psHEALTH saved 6 minutes per referral. Plus, they also reaped the benefits of SLA tracking, analytics data, and a consistent process.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4LnfFiNwYk
Agile Essential to Success: Mark Mamone, Regional CIO and Group CTO, Serco capped off the day with a remarkable story about achieving a speedy 12-week enterprise app development time (including a 2-week Sprint for planning) across 65 users.
Mamone also mentioned how Serco used Appian technology, with Genesys, to deliver contact center solutions to Federal customers, and process tens of millions of cases across thousands of contact center agents.
"Serco chose Appian because they were focused on Serco's success, not just (getting) a deal."
And now, for Something Different
John Cleese, theiconic English actor, comedian and screenwriter closed out day 2 with some brilliant, thought-provoking commentary, and an engaging conversation with Appian Founder and CEO Matt Calkins covering everything from creativity and humor to problem-solving and board games.
https://twitter.com/Appian/status/1049674338042081281
That's a Wrap for Appian Europe 2018!
This was a perfect opportunity for Appian customers, partners and end-users to engage with each other over a two-day period.
We continue to stand by our mission to take the complexity out of digital transformation, and help our customers get the most out of Appian.
We are humbled to have some of the biggest thinkers in technology join us here at Appian Europe 2018.
And we'd like to thank all of our speakers, event staff, sponsors and partners who helped us make this year's event a remarkable success.
(Note: We're not blogging day 3, which will feature an exclusive Partner Sales Boot Camp. Only Appian Partners get to take advantage of that.)
