Over a few short months in 2020, COVID-19 accelerated what so many CEOs and CTOs have struggled to do for the past decade: It forced organizations to be agile and adjust quickly to change. Oil and gas companies in particular had to react quickly to get back to onsite work while protecting their workers’ safety. Russell Stewart, host of the Oil and Gas HSE Podcast, recently sat down with some experts from Appian who specialize in our Workforce Safety solution and in the oil and gas industry.

The global COVID-19 crisis has laid bare the challenges with the structures and features of global supply chains, and has highlighted the shortcomings within many organisations' own internal working environments and business processes. Organisations across every industry are being forced to evaluate their business operations from multiple perspectives and look for ways to make their businesses more resilient to both unpredictable environments and financial stresses.

With the onslaught of hyperautomation, it’s easy to assume insurance is stodgy and boring. But don’t be fooled. Yes, the industry has its flaws—some of them fatal. But over the next decade, technology will revolutionize insurance more than it has in the past three decades combined.

Few people can understand the difference between theory and practice more clearly than a chess Grandmaster. Our little 64-square laboratory has space for centuries of ideas. With more moves than atoms in the solar system, my ancient boardgame has limitless complexity for the human mind—and was even enough to stump the world’s fastest computers for decades.

Every agile software engineering team wants to do these three things: The reality is that as we focus on improving one thing, sometimes it is at the expense of another. If we focus on accelerating feature development, feature quality could suffer. If we focus on improving feature quality, development could slow, potentially delaying the release. But what if we could have it all?

Recent headlines have highlighted some of the severe risks of older core banking systems, namely aging user interfaces and a lack of governance. The accounting foundation of an older core remains solid, but the ability to provide good governance, enforce business rules and present a user-friendly interface to the business person is often lacking.

Appian is the leader in enterprise low-code automation. We didn’t get there by being complacent, but rather from continuous, industry-leading innovations. With each release, we reinforce our commitment to helping you build apps and workflows rapidly on our low-code automation platform to help you maximize your resources and improve business results.

Appian 21.1 incorporates many highly-requested features that improve usability and productivity including updated low-code RPA and intelligent document processing (IDP) features.

Insurers, reinsurers and intermediaries are under pressure to adapt to new customer expectations. Insurtechs have made omnichannel digital experiences the norm. And COVID-19 has forced the issue further, on top of necessary operational and claims process changes. Digital transformation is no longer a buzzword or something that can fix just one area of an insurance organization.

How was that credit application declined? Why was that person denied parole? How were disability benefits cut for those constituents? And why do computers learning from humans automatically see certain occupational words as masculine and others as feminine? It’s hard to explain how the most advanced algorithms make decisions. But as predictive systems proliferate, there are signs we’ve become more wary of their use in making critical decisions.