Item: Appian
Rating: 10
Author: Olaf Neidhardt

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Appian is currently used with more than 10 apps in different business areas. Credit onboarding, KYC, Customer Service, Compliance, Internal forms, Taxes, etc. So it is used by a wide variety of users and in very different numbers of users per app, from 5 to 800.

Pros and Cons

Easily integrate data over silos
Brings together business and IT people alongside a clearcut model and languange
Quick to the market, a real emergency problem solver
Strong stability combined with excellent architecture
Provides excellent customer services and insight

License model is rigid and expensive
Hard to include end customer processes due to named user licenses or big bang packages

Return on Investment

+ Strong ROI
+ Ability to quickly solve problems, which otherwise would have created problems
+ Positive communication between Appian-IT and business
- Strong resitstance by legacy IT

Support Rating

Appian Support:

Quick, good quality, very competent (except people in accounting and billing)

Internal Support of Appian by Business:

Strong with business parts who trusted themselves to try it

Weak within classic IT, because it contradicts all classic approaches and is seen as a threat to "kingdoms"

Average to management, due to lack of insight, possible risks, and judgment

Usability

Well understood by users of apps. Given an appropriate design, apps ar always easy to understand and use. Excellent speed and usability in creating apps. Sometimes error messages are confusing and misleading, but some experience helps a lot. Other than that Appian makes App building really fast and easy. Good abilities to present and manage data, reports, tasks, and mix all needed information together in one single application.

Alternatives Considered

This question is difficult to answer. Appian is a top-of-the-list product in categories like Low-Code development, BPM Suite, RPA Development, Service Hub... so, in itself, with already available strong components like Customer Service Center, Intelligent Document Processing (incl AI & ML), Mobile Applications and so on itself. So to compare it means to compare it to all of these things.

Secondly, Appian [cannot] so much compare to a software approach, rather than a development approach. Thus it cannot be compared with JavaScript, Java, C# or Python. Its outcome has to be compared with its overall business value.

And the later cannot be overestimated.

Appian is reliable, secure, very fast, offers a real chance to be a survior of digitization challenges, opens new groups of the workforce, lets IT and Business really collaborate, challenges legacy developers, brings data together, creates excellent insight in business processes and makes business life just easier. And it saves you a LOT of money, even so it is expensive IF you have the fitting size and use cases.

Likelihood to Recommend

Excellent for data integration, quick time to market solutions, bringing technology and people together. It creates huge ROIs not only business-wise (depends on the chosen use case and method) but also infrastructure-wise in managing and operating the solution.

Needs and pushes an agile approach. Needs internal people development in order to own the technology challenges.

Creates huge discussion with traditional developers, in fear of losing territory. Needs handling. Due to the rigid named-user-driven license model it is not so easy to involve end-customers in unknown quantities into your processes.

Appian is great choice and a difference maker

Overall Satisfaction with Appian