The philosophy behind continuous improvement is simple: incremental and ongoing changes to your organization result in more efficient business processes, better products, and superior customer experiences. The pursuit of excellence is familiar to many of us in our daily work, and your organization may already have a culture, goal, or process management method designed to improve performance and facilitate operational excellence.

Today, data is the lifeblood of every organization. Without it, you’re left without key insights into business processes, consumers, employees, and the overall health of your entire organization. And here’s the scariest part: most organizations are on life support due to their inability to properly manage their data and turn it into actionable insights. Data fabric technology can help in a significant way, which is why it’s been getting so much buzz recently.

With the new year well underway, you might be feeling like all the new initiatives, lists of priorities, and looming project deadlines are endless—and you’re probably wondering how you’ll get it all done. Appian is here to help.

Data fabrics are getting a lot of attention lately, and for good reason. But, for any topic with a lot of hype, there also tends to be a lot of confusion. If you are still trying to fully grasp where the concept of a data fabric architecture fits amongst all of the warehouses, lakes, lakehouses, and meshes of the data engineering world, let's set the record straight. What is a data fabric? A data fabric is a toolset that connects data across disparate sources to create a unified data model.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) bring significant efficiency gains to organizations and should play critical roles in any digital transformation efforts. One major use case for these technologies is AI document processing, also known as intelligent document processing (IDP). Organizations amass a large number of business documents—from invoices in billing departments to medical coding documents at hospitals.

Why do experiences matter? In turbulent economic times, organizations that can't offer high-quality digital products and services with excellent experiences cannot attract and retain customers and employees. Customers today are seeking more than just products or services. They are looking for memorable experiences that create a lasting impact and emotional connection with the organizations they interact with. And they are more than willing to pay more to have those experiences.

The software landscape at a modern financial services company is like a jigsaw puzzle, with many pieces that must fit together. For example: Software development can be more difficult in an environment that requires complex enterprise integrations. How do you create flexible, modern, and scalable applications that require technology integrations and data from dozens of sources?

Process automation is a worthy goal for any organization. Automation unleashes human innovation, increases process effectiveness, and empowers your operations to adjust to change. But taking a pell-mell approach to automation will put these benefits at risk—you might actually create new inefficiencies you’ll have to rectify later. So before you get started with process automation, keep these five key things in mind.

With skyrocketing inflation and growing severity of weather-related losses, 2022 was a tough year for insurers. We were spot-on with our 2022 predictions—such as the need to improve the customer experience, increased adoption of connected underwriting, and the growing importance of ESG. While many of last year’s trends will continue into 2023, we have identified several emerging trends for this year.

To be good stewards of taxpayer dollars, state and local governments conduct market research and perform due diligence before purchasing a software solution. Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products are often positioned as offering the best price tag and the fastest deployment. However, the promise of a speedy installation often goes unmet.