Innovation with impact
Appian is leading the way for low-code technology by fostering a culture where employees feel empowered to drive positive change.
By WP BrandStudio
The pandemic has moved a sizable number of business operations online — in many cases, permanently — and organizations are scrambling to keep up. Companies are confronting new security and customer service concerns, for example, and many businesses need to boost their efficiency and speed. Low-code technology — the coding equivalent of point-and-shoot cameras — is empowering businesses to create solutions for these kinds of challenges.
By using low-code, organizations can take direct aim at whatever problem they want to solve, whether they need to automate thousands of hours of manual work, respond to customer service inquiries more quickly, or help college students manage their academic schedule. And organizations don’t have to wait for help from experienced software developers anymore, because low-code is easy for non-computer scientists to learn to use.
“Instead of writing lines of code from scratch, you’re writing very short snippets of code,” said Gaurav Shekhar, Program Director of the Graduate Business Analytics Program at the University of Texas at Dallas.
Moreover, low-code allows companies to build new applications 10 times faster than they could with traditional coding, giving them greater control over their operations, more quickly than ever.
And low-code is only becoming more prominent in the business world. Gartner predicts that 66 percent of larger companies will use low-code software by 2024.
“Low-code rose to prominence in 2020 because it was a good way for organizations to respond to all the change that surrounded them, keep a step ahead of it, and be strategic in the face of disruption,” said Matt Calkins, CEO of Appian, an enterprise cloud software company headquartered in McLean, Va.
An empowering culture results in empowering low-code products
Even though low-code is a highly accessible technology, only the most empowered workers can bring low-code to its full potential as a tool for creating tangible change. That’s been true inside of Appian, the first company to go public (in 2017) as a low-code firm, and rated the low-code leader by the world’s largest organizations. Appian’s culture revolves around open discussion, and dissent is not only accepted but encouraged. This creates an atmosphere in which ideas are constantly surfaced, considered collaboratively, and driving the direction of the company.
“Everyone is respected and their standing is not diminished by the fact that they disagree with someone else or something else,” Calkins said.
Having respect for others’ ideas is especially important right now. Culture is playing an even more substantial role in the post-pandemic workplace: Employee engagement decreased by 52 percent in 2020 among companies with non-thriving cultures — where employees don’t feel as much sense of purpose, opportunity and leadership — compared to a one percent decrease among companies that have thriving cultures.
Appian is a perfect example. The company’s thriving culture resulted in powerful real-world impacts during the past year. Appian created solutions for the Defense Information Systems Agency (a U.S. Department of Defense combat support agency) and the UK National Health Service, for example. Calkins emphasized that none of it would be happening if not for Appian’s unique culture.
“Like our product, our company is empowering,” he said.
When ideas translate into impact
Engineer Tim Carroll knows Appian’s culture well, having been with the company for nearly seven years. The respect among colleagues is so strong that “even someone fresh out of college can email anyone in the organization and expect a response,” Carroll said. Moreover, he appreciates working to have an impact, rather than simply working to completion. It isn’t enough for an employee to deliver an Appian product to a customer. Instead, employees focus on what happens after delivery and on holding themselves accountable for the outcomes. That includes knowing whether customers use low-code features effectively and continue using those features over the long term.
For his part, Carroll and his colleagues brought the power of low-code to D.C. Central Kitchen, a Washington-based nonprofit that seeks to empower the greater community through food. Providing healthy meals for homeless shelters and local schools, and training jobless adults in the culinary arts, are just two of its driving missions.
Carroll noticed that D.C. Central Kitchen’s workers were tracking inventory and managing databases on old-fashioned, time-consuming spreadsheets. They jumped in to help, streamlining the organization’s workflow by automating many of the processes involved in daily operations.
“[Low-code] is fast,” Carroll said. “Since Appian is donating the software, it doesn’t cost the employees volunteering much time to really revolutionize the way an organization runs.”
That commitment is having a real and sustained impact: Appian applications are saving D.C. Central Kitchen’s Community Meals program team 500 hours per year, and increasing the return on investment for the nonprofit’s volunteer hours. Appian’s software is also providing deeper insights into the efficiency of various D.C. Central Kitchen programs, “so they can actually improve the services they’re providing to the community,” Carroll said. He has since developed a close working relationship with the organization’s staff.
“We are all about empowering their knowledge workers and reducing process inefficiency and process waste,” Carroll said, “so that they’re able to provide the best services and spend as much time and energy as they can improving services, rather than just keeping the wheels turning.”
And he doesn’t think any of this would have come to pass without feeling Appian empowered him, Carroll said. When he has an idea, whether for improving local nonprofits’ operations or heightening worker safety by tracking covid-19 vaccinations, he never hesitates to tell his team. That’s precisely the sort of mutual trust and sense of empowerment Calkins has strived to instill in his staff.
“We’re ready for anybody to step up and lead. And the organization is ready to follow and lend its strength to leaders who can come from anywhere,” Calkins said.