Delivering agility through digitalisation

Low-code platforms helps Kiwi organisations easily facilitate the digitalisation and automation of processes.  They take enterprise software to new levels of connectivity, agility and speed.

Digitalisation is a word that gets mentioned a lot in business circles whenever the subject of business growth and efficiency is raised.

Nobody knows this more than Matt Calkins, CEO and co-founder of Washington DC-based Appian, a unified platform that helps businesses worldwide discover, design, and automate their most important data processes. He describes digitalisation as the use of technology to improve your customer service comms and unify your business, and says organisations have struggled to implement digital business models in the past because they weren’t serious about it.

“Digital was always something you talked about, but didn’t do.

“The pandemic has now changed attitudes on data and digitalisation around the world,” he says. “It reinforced just how important agility is and how our businesses depend on that agility.”

Matt says enterprise software has traditionally been laid down in a problem/response pattern, which has had the effect of creating silos of data and deeper decentralisation.

“Digital has to overcome the dispersion of data-logic and users in order to provide real benefits to customers’ success and real organisation-wide agility.”

He explains the typical scenario of a customer connecting by phone or app. In that moment your business needs to be able to quickly and seamlessly access all relevant information on that customer from multiple databases.

“Unfortunately, customer data, from CRM to technical support, has typically been scattered across different systems. Data centralisation is a myth,” says Matt.

Appian provides the process automation platform that facilitates the entire lifecycle of a new process, he explains, from figuring out what the data process should do, to designing in new code in a unique flowchart style, to automated execution of the process.

Traditionally software companies have made the mistake of building apps or processes and then failing to modify or change it.  “It becomes immutable,” explains Matt, “locking organisations into out-of-date behaviour.”

Your software must be flexible, personal and accessible; not robotic,” he says. “And easy to change to allow for the latest strategies and regulations.”

“Appian takes away the laborious and divided nature of enterprise software and makes it something connected, agile and fast.” – Appian CEO and founder Matt Calkins.”

Overcoming the barriers

Some organisations and businesses are progressing faster on the digitalisation of processes than others. “These are organisations that prioritise agility and have a high volume of decisions to make,” explains Matt, “and there’s likely a lot of money at stake.”

He says banks are good examples as they often have to make quick and accurate decisions on loans. “Because banks have a lot riding on decisions, and care a lot about both speed and accuracy, they’re among the leading adopters of the new process automation technology.

Matt believes that the barriers to successful digitalisation are lower than people imagine, and Appian’s software is extremely easy to learn.

Even if you have technical skills that are out of date, you can still be a certified expert on the Appian platform in a couple of months, he says, and right now there is a high demand for Appian expertise.

“Taking the course that makes you an expert is almost free, and our worldwide Appian community has grown by 222 percent in the past 12 months. This is an exciting time to be getting into low-code[i] software.”

Appian in action

Pepper Money, the largest non-bank lender in Australia and New Zealand, launched its first product on the Appian platform in New Zealand.

By choosing Appian, Pepper Money was able to build a new mortgage broker lending app for New Zealand, going from concept to production, in a market where they’d never had a presence before, in just three months.

Appian’s process technology allows applications for loans to be digitally turned around incredibly fast for customers.

To learn more about Appian’s Low-Code Platform and how it can deliver greater agility for your business go to: https://appian.com