One of the biggest failings of old-school, custom software development is its inability to help large organizations survive against unexpected challenges and quickly adapt to change. It could hardly be otherwise. For decades, companies were limited by inflexible business applications that took so much time to architect, develop, test and deploy. Not to mention the time it took to maintain, upgrade and enhance them. All of which set the stage for a revolution.

The COVID-19 global pandemic has added new urgency to the quest for digital transformation. The pandemic disrupted business processes and displaced and disconnected people. Organizations across the globe witnessed first-hand that the speed with which they could get new automations and applications in place could literally make or break the company. The world quickly learned what some industry leaders already knew: the ability to develop an application and quickly bring it to market is crucial.

For the past two years, Appian has scored high marks in both categories, landing in the upper right corner of the Magic Quadrant as a leader.

The software development life cycle doesn’t stop at development. Many low-code options today provide tools to accelerate application development. However, they do little to help developers deploy or maintain applications. Appian recognized these issues years ago and have worked to build a platform that delivers the value of low-code throughout the entire application lifecycle.

In 20.1, Appian introduced Intelligent Document Processing or IDP. IDP lets Appian users leverage artificial intelligence to transform unstructured data from their business documents into structured data. Many business documents such as invoices, POs, loan applications, insurance claims, etc., include forms and/or check boxes. To support such use cases 20.3 now includes the ability to recognize and extract table and checkbox data from documents.

In challenging circumstances, the UK banking sector is showing signs of greater agility and innovation than possibly ever before, say the results of a new survey. Working with FT Focus, we polled senior leaders from retail, commercial and investment banks with a presence in the UK to uncover the impact of COVID-19 on core operations. The results make for interesting reading. Some 78% of respondents said that UK banks have “surprised themselves with their adaptability during the pandemic.

Stay tuned for improvements to Intelligent Document Processing, DevOps capabilities, and UI improvements. Information lives in silos across the enterprise, causing inefficiencies and delays for your workforce. Records can provide that single-pane-of-glass view that users look for. However, some external data sources are slow, or even worse, rate limited by the vendor hosting that data. Appian’s new feature, Synced Records, offers a solution to this problem.

With the blistering pace of digital transformation, disruption won’t wait for organizations to adapt. In fact, the most important application you write from year to year might be software you have only weeks to write. The best option for success is a software delivery methodology that delivers value fast. Which is where our newly published Appian Delivery Methodology comes in.

If there was a theme around Appian 20.3, it is building on top of an already capable platform. For example, Appian records have been a customer favorite for several years. Records are easy-to-build, and they centralize data from multiple sources into a single actionable view. In this release, we build on the power of Appian records with record-powered grids.