In the month of January, AppianLife hosted a book club with Mike Beckley, Appian’s Co-Founder and CTO. We discussed Appian’s recently released book, Hyperautomation, how COVID has changed people’s perspective on automation, and how low-code is changing the way people work for the better. Here’s what we learned!
Automation isn’t about replacing humans.
Appian is interested in building software for people — giving people more control and power over their machines and their jobs. We’re currently facing a crisis of too much information and too much change, with workers getting bogged down in complicated tasks and unable to work towards a bigger picture. With automation, we can use algorithms, robots, and artificial intelligence to abstract away those complex tasks, and augment human thought and potential. Hyperautomation becomes hyper-people — elevating people to meet the challenges of the future. By using technology to make a complicated universe simpler, we can unleash the creative power in all of us.
Low-Code is for strategic projects.
Low-code brings together cross-functional teams, because you can put the business rules and process in the hands of the business users, while maintaining the guardrails and governance that keep an organization stable. And low-code promotes adoption, because people can see and understand the software they’re creating at the moment of creation. Low-code is fast, and it gets faster the more you use it. All this gives companies confidence that they’ll get a return on their investment, and accomplish their goals quickly. Thus, they can guarantee their digital transformation projects won’t just be window dressing or get lost among other priorities.
COVID shows the importance of agility.
When the pandemic first struck, it was easier for many businesses to make changes such as completely rearranging where their workforce lives than it was to change their software. It was clear that businesses needed a faster, more agile way to develop software. When business rules and logic are buried in code, it’s difficult to make necessary changes without breaking things. In contrast, enterprises that have adopted low-code are able to react quickly to crises. For example, financial institutions were able to quickly react to new government schemes like the US government’s Paycheck Protection Plan by using low-code and APIs to process billions of dollars in loans to millions of applicants. The pandemic made clear how relevant and urgent an innovation capability is to businesses — and low-code enables that.
Low-Code interfaces are an under-sold asset.
Appian is already well established as a leader in managing complex processes, but we often under-sell our SAIL-based interface layer. There’s a lot more to an interface than just being a pretty picture — and often, frameworks that allow you to customize their appearance will break entirely when you make a small change or an upgrade. With low-code, you can build engaging, flexible, and powerful interfaces, while still being future-ready. So, if new accessibility requirements or web technologies emerge, you can update your applications straight away, and make updates across your whole platform with ease. Low-code is also more secure — you can make configuration changes without compromising security, and having an interface layer that only surfaces data to authorized users is a big part of that.
Everyone at Appian contributes to the future of the product.
Features that make it easier to build an interface that reflects what you really want, or enhancements to DevOps that make it easier to push a change to production, all contribute to making the entire software development lifecycle smoother and more productive. People at Appian might play different roles in this process. They could be working in Engineering, building new features to unify people, bots and AI. Or they could be in Sales or Customer Success, working with clients to understand how Appian is used on the ground, and feeding back to the wider product team. Or they might just be helping recruit, train and nurture the next generation of talent at Appian. Whatever your speciality, working at Appian lets you contribute to a more productive, hyper-automated future for us all.
At Appian, we believe low-code is going to underpin the most important business transformation projects of the future. If you want to work for the leader in the low-code space, we’re hiring for roles across Engineering, Customer Success, Sales, and more. Head to careers.appian.com to find the perfect role for you!