Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

“By year’s end, 75% of development shops will use low-code platforms” Forrester recently released its Predictions 2021: Software Development, providing insight into the application development and delivery landscape in 2021. While the report includes a number of predictions, two predictions are particularly relevant to Appian: Forrester predicts that: The Appian Low-Code Automation Platform helps organizations build elegant solutions for complex business problems.

With the Appian 20.4 release, we’ve made it faster and easier to build new applications, extend legacy systems, and automate any business processes. 2021 is the year of Hyperautomation. Your workforce will be fully enabled by AI, bots, and other automation technologies in seamless interactions and processes. Appian is the only platform that orchestrates people, processes, bots and AI in a single workflow.

Digital transformation is one thing. Getting people involved is another. Right now, there’s a disconnect between the culture of digital transformation that companies say they aspire to create and the organizational behavior they actually have, says Lisa Heneghan, Chief Digital Officer and a member of the Executive Committee of KPMG, UK. But here’s the good news: Organizations that invest in bridging the people gap will benefit the most from innovation, according to Heneghan.

Whoa! Another prediction season is already upon us. Shaped by the fast-moving aftershocks of the COVID-19 crisis, 2021 promises to be a time of change. As usual, we made our predictions list and checked it twice. But rather than guess the future, we asked experts, business leaders, and big thinkers to help us size up noteworthy trends and technologies that should be on your radar in 2021 and beyond. Here’s a quick rundown of what we found out.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently released recommendations on how organizations should use case management solutions to manage returning to onsite work in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the CDC, case management tools can “make the traditional contact tracing process faster and more efficient” by streamlining data capture and management and merging workflows with other workforce management solutions such as surveillance systems.

As many countries face another wave of COVID-19 cases, organizations around the world are planning new ways to keep their workforces safe. Leading companies have made huge strides in managing coronavirus while keeping their workplaces open. But despite how far we’ve come, many employees still doubt that their organizations are ready to respond to COVID-19.

Automation was already well on its way to becoming a ubiquitous investment in 2020, then the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated interest and adoption. Organizations started deploying Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), and other automation capabilities en masse, which interacted with mission-critical systems, legacy applications, and workers in both the front and back office.

Testing is a critical step if you want to ensure quality in your products. It’s crucial to test your applications to make sure they work properly – otherwise, customers are less likely to buy or continue to use them. While important, software testing can be a repetitive process that takes time and resources you’d probably rather use for tasks that deliver innovation to the functionality or performance. This is where test automation comes in.

Even before COVID-19 became the biggest challenge to operational resilience in a generation, organizations were struggling with a gap between digital transformation and internal processes that felt decidedly “pre-digital.” Automation presents a solution, connecting new tools to old, legacy systems through three key shifts in technology.