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Marc Wilson is the founder of Appian and oversees the company’s global strategic partnerships. With Appian’s low-code system increasingly used by clients and consultants around the world, Consultancy.org sat down with Wilson to understand some of the key opportunities for Australian organizations – and how consultants can help in the process.
Tell us about your role as Chief Partner Officer; What does this mean
The most important thing I do every day is to increase the number of people able to have a conversation about what Appian can do.
A lot of people don’t understand our capabilities, and I love seeing a light bulb go off in people’s minds when they understand the power of the Appian platform. Whether I’m educating people face-to-face, virtually, or through content creation, I love witnessing the power of that knowledge and the excitement it creates.
Appian expands its partnership or partner team locally. Can you tell us about your growth plans and goals for the coming years in terms of working with partners?
We see Australia and Asia Pacific as a high growth region, which is reflected in our partnership and distribution strategy. We are investing in Australia in a way that recognizes the opportunity for growth, with partners of course being one of the most important areas. We plan to expand our sales reach, whether through more account leads, solutions, consultants or marketing.
Appian is not only looking to penetrate deeper into the high-end large Australian customers, but we also want to expand in terms of the customers we reach. We believe our success in medium and small businesses around the world is equally applicable to the Australian market.
What should consultants know about low code?
It’s not just for citizen developers. Low code is best for critical and complex applications. The old model of building inflexible technology that is only effective for a limited time no longer works. The applications that are needed today and will be dominant in the future are a fusion of different technologies.
Low-code provides a continuous cycle consisting of process discovery, building workflows and automation. And when you finish something, you go back to the discovery phase and start over.
How did Appian become a leader in the low-code space? How did society evolve into what it is today?
Matt Calkins, Robert Kramer, Michael Meckley and I started the company in 1999 without a product or business plan. We didn’t know what we wanted to offer the market, but we knew where we wanted to be: in a space that wasn’t commoditized, that was solving the most complex business problems, and that wasn’t going to be quickly taken over by a big entity.
We chose the business process management (BPM) space, which turned out to be very fortuitous. With innovations such as being the first company to offer a completely web-based process and design environment, Forrester and Gartner have identified Appian as an industry leader within a few years. The BPM workflow space soon became a low-code space and brought us to where we are today.
Are advisory groups important to Appian and how does Appian work with them?
Consulting is and always will be essential to Appian. In fact, working with consulting partners was our primary funding mechanism prior to publication.
Prior to 2017, our revenue split was generally 50/50 between software and services. Today, it is closer to 80 percent software and 20 percent services. So our software sales continued to grow and our services didn’t grow as much.
This is because we have enabled our partners to fill these gaps. We recognize that consulting firms play a key role in understanding clients’ issues and histories. And combining Appian’s technical expertise with business process understanding is essential to making these projects work and helping our partners increase their revenue.
Our partnership strategy is focused on consulting companies that help organizations on their transformation journeys through a low-code application platform. The work Appian does with consulting companies is a win-win relationship. For most consultancies we work with, the low bar for growth they see for their Appian practices is 50 percent. That’s a low bar. Most of them are currently looking at triple digits.
What are Australian organizations doing wrong when it comes to digital transformation today?
I think organizations are doing two things wrong when embarking on a digital transformation journey. First, there is a constant struggle to understand that digital transformation is about workflow and data. Organizations tend to focus on one or the other, leading to many spectacular failures.
Second, they don’t really understand the importance of business psychology when it comes to digital transformation. It’s a momentum game; you must have successful projects to avoid resentment.
The first app you build needs to touch enough people to get them on board and show them where the project is going. I believe that digital transformation efforts fail because most people still think that technology is something that was done to them. They have no sense of ownership. They think, “Oh, great. A new system. I’ll give it a month and then go back to the old way of doing business.”
Many people think that digital transformation is just taking something that used to be on paper and making it digital. And sometimes they believe that transformation is just the act of doing something else. It’s really about bringing these things together to make it easier for the end user, seamless for the end user, and a better overall experience. And I think a lot of digital transformation initiatives are just modernizing a siled experience.
What influence does corporate culture have on digital transformation?
Corporate culture has a huge impact on how organizations approach digital transformation and how successfully projects are implemented.
Organizations always think their challenges are unique, but what really differs is their corporate culture, even within the same industry. Success is often entirely based on how well a business can understand how to leverage a tool like low code.
Our problem is that some organizations spend all their time explaining what is wrong with the prototype without understanding that it is only a starting point that has worked in the past; we can do whatever they want us to do.
What challenges do Australian organizations face today on their digital transformation journeys?
Global demand for developers currently exceeds supply. According to Morgan Stanley, there are currently a total of 26 million developers in the world and it is expected that we will need 38 million by 2024.
In Australia, the Covid-19 pandemic has driven progress towards digitisation, but a shortage of development talent is now putting key projects at risk of delay or failure.
Appian addresses the developer talent shortage by providing access to low-code education and certification to a new generation of low-code developers. Our free #lowcode4all program provides participants with a clear path to learn low-code technology and complete the Appian Certified Associate Developer exam. The program is available to current undergraduate and graduate students, students who have interrupted their education, unemployed individuals and people looking for a career change.
Can you talk about some of Appian’s recent innovations and why consultants should care?
Appian recently added a process mining capability that provides our consultants and their customers with a platform that provides a comprehensive, repeatable cycle of continuous improvement.
Data process mining allows our consultants to review historical information, interpret it and identify workflow bottlenecks. Then a unified platform can quickly create prototypes, which helps our consultants to break away from projects with a limited horizon. Combining data mining with workflow design and automation allows one technology project to flow into the next.
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