Item: Appian
Rating: 8
Author: Aaron Witt

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Appian is a key component of our initiative to automate business processes and improve the quality of manual work through tailored LOB applications. It enables rapid delivery and iteration on these internal applications. We are also taking advantage of its strengths in the case management area.

Pros and Cons

Making process models the core of the solutions you build, with AI, Bot and human interactions through low-code UX.
Highly skilled professional services team.
Low code data integration that provides a platform for unifying data across back-end systems.
Ideal for building tailored case management solutions.

No built-in support for integrating with messaging or event streaming systems.
Limited ability to customize UX beyond the out of the box components.
No true cloud auto-scaling (yet); relies on reserved VM instances.

Return on Investment

Positive ROI on our first initiative aimed at reducing compliance costs through a combination of increased speed and accuracy.

Support Rating

The professional services team from Appian that we're working with is the best I've seen. They are fast, responsive, professional and highly skilled in extracting key business objectives during their solution discovery process.

Usability

The Appian designer does make it quick to develop low-code applications, but it does still require a non-trivial amount of training in concepts (Records, Interfaces, etc.) before users will be productive. Fortunately Appian also provides a very thorough catalog of online training classes to get your users up to speed quickly.

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Power Automate (formerly microsoft flow)

Appian is best in class for BPM and low-code UX areas, and has a well stocked marketplace when you need to integrate with systems not supported by first party connectors. However, the integration with Microsoft Azure and Office 365 platforms is not as strong (as expected) as the first party Power Platform solution. Appian is also less scalable than the newer breed of cloud native vendors that can deploy your applications in a server-less environment supporting full scale-up and scale-down.

Other Software Used

Snowflake, MongoDB Atlas, Salesforce CMS

Likelihood to Recommend

Great for internal applications where complete control of the UX is not needed and the rapid development cycle of low-code can really shine.
Great for building tailored case management solutions where the underlying escalation process can be customized via the BPM editor.
Not appropriate for external/customer facing web portals that are public and/or where per-user licensing is a concern.

A great BPM and low-code solution for LOB applications

Overall Satisfaction with Appian