In today’s era of budget austerity, every federal agency must improve processes, cut costs and deliver value quickly. BPM (business process management) is one technique that can help develop applications that achieve these objectives.
Combined with cloud, mobile, and social technology, BPM becomes even more powerful, creating an environment to make good on the government’s “Cloud First” policies and taking federal agencies to new heights in mission-critical functions, delivering value in record time.
For example, the Department of Education successfully migrated a critical application to the cloud in three months. It used Appian’s cloud BPM software to improve its processes while taking full advantage of the elasticity and scalability of the cloud to collect survey data as part of the “No Child Left Behind” program and The Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) process.
CRDC collects data on key education and civil rights issues in America’s public schools, including enrollment, educational services, and academic proficiency. The resulting data is used by the agency, policymakers, and researchers.
According to a report by CIO.gov, “By moving to a cloud solution, the CRDC was able to survey over 15% more school districts and make the surveys easier for districts to fill out by tailoring each survey so only applicable information was requested.”
CDRC data collection involves a huge number of users pounding on the application for a relatively brief period, with a considerable drop-off in volume thereafter. Appian’s cloud-based application handles this kind of usage spike with no additional application cost, exemplifying the advantages of a cloud-based app.
Education was operating under a federally-mandated deadline date to launch this application and acknowledged that it could not have procured and stood up the necessary hardware for an on-premise solution by the deadline, to say nothing of deploying the application itself. With this application, users create their own purpose-built applications for process improvement through a code-free and intuitive “point-and-click” set of icons. The time required to build the CDRC application and put it to work in the cloud was an astonishingly quick three months.
Steve Charles is co-founder and executive vice president of immixGroup, Inc., which helps technology companies do business with the government. He is also a member of Breaking Gov’s Editorial Advisory Council.