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Aegon's Intelligent Automation CoE
Summary
Aegon supports its digital distribution channels and growing demand for customer self-service capabilities through their Intelligent Automation Team (IAT): a Center of Excellence which enables digital automation and innovation.
Featured Voices
Boris Buis
BPM Leader
Frans Stuifbergen
BPM Leader
Snapshot
Industry: Financial Services
Headquarters: The Hague, Netherlands
Number of Employees: 3,500+
Website: Aegon Asset Management
Aegon's CoE Journey
The IAT was not created overnight, but rather evolved into its current form over several years. Aegon began their Appian Journey in late 2015 with an initial project within the Pensions Department - that ultimately went into production in early 2016. This success was followed shortly by a second application launched in the Life Protection Department.
At this point, “we saw more and more interest and initiatives coming-up as Appian was positioned as a target solution for our BPM space”, says Boris Buis, the IAT BPM Lead. “There was no clear platform responsibility for central activities (license management, platform upgrades, etc.), so we added a virtual Appian maintenance team to handle those activities.”
The maintenance team was successful for a time, but eventually Aegon noticed teams “reinventing the wheel over-and-over again when working with Appian”. As more teams with a greater variety of maturities began working with Appian, build quality suffered as the number of duplicative development incidents increased. Thus, in 2018, Aegon created the Appian Enablement team.
This new team was tasked with bringing Appian knowledge and practitioners into a common community. Within the DevOps space, they also introduced governance, security and provisioning across the organization.
“At this time, we had 20 applications and 10 teams working with Appian and were evolving our CI/CD pipeline. We made the business case to scale-up the Appian Enablement team to support creating reusable components, leading a community of practice to share knowledge and conduct platform onboarding and training. By this point, I believe we were already late, which, in some cases, resulted in poorly scalable applications with higher maintenance costs.”
Towards the end of 2019, Aegon also added Intelligent Automation Services to the team's profile and reorganized under the new title of Intelligent Automation Team (IAT). Boris noted that the goal was to bring these capabilities closer together under one umbrella and with a more service oriented posture, “We created a BPM-RPA framework that allows users to easily integrate our robotic workforce to their Appian processes. All technical integrations, error handling, callbacks and maintenance are taken care of.”
In the future, Aegon wants to move the IAT value proposition towards a ‘hyper-automation’ services portfolio; enabling business units to increase speed and innovation.
IAT Overview and Responsibilities
Aegon’s IAT has 8 total FTEs (2 dedicated to Appian) and enables more than 16 federated DevOps teams within the business to support over 50 applications. They are responsible for conducting activities across 5 main areas including: Governance & Reporting, Delivering Intelligent Automation Services, Training & Skills Development, Quality/Benefits Tracking and Inspiring & Advising.
Governance & Reporting
The IAT ensures Appian deployments are completed according to Aegon-wide CI/CD processes. Specific reporting activities include: monitoring core metrics on platform health, incident reporting, license management and automated provisioning.
Delivering Intelligent Automation Services
The IAT works directly with business units to identify and build common automation capabilities and services: “We are currently working on an intelligent document processing solution that uses multiple automation capabilities, but is ultimately delivered as a single service. This empowers our business units with a menu of capabilities with a small investment and reduces time-to-market.”
Training & Skills Development
For training, Aegon’s IAT always attempts to align participant capabilities and Aegon-specific requirements with the type of training provided. For example, the IAT created an in-house RPA training program tailored to Aegon’s specific needs: “You can’t just send people to training and expect success. You need to provide support throughout the learning journey- which should include mentoring and guidance after any formal training concludes.”
Quality/Benefits Tracking
The IAT conducts regular health checks for applications within their portfolio and reviews these findings with application teams. Here, they outline future plans regarding application health management. Aegon’s IAT also tracks stakeholder satisfaction and benefits delivered by automation solutions.
Inspiring & Advising
The IAT works with business units to identify unmet needs and advise on new application or capability additions. Also, based on new Appian capabilities, they proactively pitch new solution ideas to business partners and help them see the art-of-the-possible: "“Having ‘Inspiring & Advising’ be part of our services portfolio enables us to work alongside the business to create smart solutions. A recent example is the creation of a self-service task framework that lets business units directly request additional information from customers or intermediaries integrated as part of the business process.”
Success Measures
Having success measures in place not only holds the IAT accountable for their performance, but also enables them to communicate expectations and successes to stakeholders. Aegon measures their progress every 100 days to ensure they are moving in the right direction and achieving core goals.
The results of these metrics are coupled with customer satisfaction surveys and are evaluated for continuous improvement and a drive towards increasing value.
Lessons Learned
Adapt Quickly to Changing Dynamics
"IT is moving fast and a platform like Appian evolves quickly.  Have a dot on the horizon to work towards, but be ready to adapt to change.  For Aegon, that means staying ahead of the game, so that when Appian releases new functionality we are ready."
Promote a High Quality Platform
"Aegon's CoE is responsible for platform health, so we charge them to protect a platform quality.  They decide and communicate core Appian competencies development teams need to maintain. This mitigates risk and keeps the platform stable."
Develop your CoE Early in your Journey
"Setup centralized responsibilities from day one.  It doesn't have to be dedicated team, but think about what your portfolio growth is going to look like because it happens fast.  By the time there's a burning need, you're already too late."
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Aon
Aon, a leading global professional services firm, exists to shape decisions for the better — to protect and enrich the lives of people around the world. Aon provides its clients in more than 120 countries with advice and solutions that give them the clarity and confidence to make better decisions to protect and grow their business.
Aon utilized Appian to optimize its reinsurance claims process resulting in a significant acceleration of claim uptake and invoice processing. This was done as part of an operating model change in Aon's Reinsurance Solutions group to leverage major processing hubs for transactional work to allow local staffing resources to focus on expanded client advocacy.
Aon Transforms Reinsurance Claims Processing with Appian
Business Problem
Starting in 2018, Aon Reinsurance Solutions initiated an operational transformation program, making adjustments to daily roles and responsibilities for Aon's staff worldwide and introducing new business processes and corresponding changes to critical business applications.
Aon needed an enterprise-grade, comprehensive system to ensure their high level of service was not only maintained—but improved—during this transition.
Appian Solution
Leveraging the 8-week Appian Guarantee, Aon deployed a new claims workflow application to support the transformation, enabling employees to shift their focus to client advocacy and enhanced service delivery.
Using Appian’s prebuilt plug-ins and API framework, Aon seamlessly combines vast amounts of previously siloed data and logic, accelerating the creation of new claims workflows across the enterprise while leveraging existing algorithm, claims, and billing logic.
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Aon Reinsurance Solutions digitized and automated its reinsurance claims process using The Appian AI Process Platform.
We were facing a complex business problem and wanted to change our operating model by centralizing more transaction processes. However, traditional development methods lacked the capacity and time required for this transformation. Appian not only enabled fast and efficient low-code development, but has helped us to reimagine our processes entirely through automation."
-Bob Olson, Chief Information Officer, Reinsurance Solutions, Aon
Appian is a software company that automates business processes. The Appian AI Process Platform includes everything you need to design, automate, and optimize even the most complex processes, from start to finish. The world's most innovative organizations trust Appian to improve their workflows, unify data, and optimize operations—resulting in better growth and superior customer experiences.
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Astria's Delivery Services CoE - Story - Success - Appian Community
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Astria's Delivery Services CoE
Profiles In Appian Excellence: Case Study
Organization Overview
Industry: Global PharmaceuticalsRevenue: $50+ billionEmployees: 100,000+
*Astria is a pseudonym case profile.
Summary
Astria* is a global pharmaceuticals company whose CoE is managed by IT and provides application development and delivery services to distributed business lines. Their CoE resources work closely with a pool of preferred partners, allowing the team to influence outcomes across a portfolio of projects.
We want to work together with business partners to help them see the art-of-the-possible. Appian has a lot to offer, but if a business partner is unfamiliar, we want to make sure we're using Appian for the most appropriate projects.
IT Manager and CoE Lead
Astria's CoE Journey
Astria began their Appian Journey with small projects, the success of which helped build confidence across business partners for future investment. Soon other business units started using Appian for their own, independent project.
By 2018, the Astria was working with multiple external partners on Appian projects and “needed a central group to support those applications”, says the IT Manager and CoE Lead. “While our CoE initially had a limited focus on application support, we realized the benefit of a more centralized group coordinating between the partners that do Appian development and our internal business units.”
“Over the past year, we’ve shifted our approach from one of support to become more of a delivery services provider, advising business partners on potential projects, coordinating delivery with partners, and sharing knowledge across internal and external teams. Like an external services provider, we are funded via project costs ultimately billed back to the business.”
In the future, Astria wants the CoE to expand its delivery services offerings to more effectively scale as partners take on a greater number of projects. They also want to increase speed by working with other teams on automation initiatives such as RPA, IDP and AI.
CoE Overview and Roles
The CoE has 8 total FTEs, works with four external development and delivery partners with 70+ individuals on those teams. They also work directly with business partners and support over 15 applications. In the near future, they would like to double their team’s resources and further invest in functional stability (governance) to more effectively support Appian initiatives across the business. “All our funding comes from the delivery of projects, so it’s hard to justify spending on foundational group capabilities that are necessary for our group to scale effectively."
“Developing good talent and building out the base of skills in a team can be a challenge, but is something you can’t skimp on. Having a team with a blended skillset has helped us accelerate development with partners."
Current roles on the team include: architects, scrum masters, developers, testers and a contracting/licensing expert. The goal is to embed delivery expertise into distributed projects and fully map against SDLC needs - ecosystem, platform and development experts that can guide both business partners and delivery teams end-to-end.
CoE Responsibilities
Project Initiation Services
The CoE works with business units to scope projects based on business needs. They also assess fit with Appian and recommend potential delivery options back to business partners.
Partner Coordination Services
The CoE ensures partners develop and deploy applications according to the company’s specific requirements. They will periodically conduct partner audits to ensure appropriate oversight and will also manage relevant contracts and licenses.
Applications Support Services
For the most part, the CoE does not directly support applications after they are built. Instead, they provide advisory services to lines of business about how to effectively manage and maintain those applications. For example, the CoE team often advises on application enhancement requests.
Lessons Learned
Promote a product mindset
"The team must have a 'product mindset'. This means they need to understand the business problem the app needs to address end-to-end. If they don't they tend to become 'feature focused'...and risk producing an app that does not, in the end, have the desired business impact."
Don't just take orders, shape them
"If given the choice, 90% of the time business units (BUs) will just ask for their backlog to be completed without much informed prioritization or knowledge sharing around what's best. The CoE needs to serve as a trusted advisor to help BUs shape their direction."
Blended teams accelerate partners
"Having a team with blended skills is critical when working with a partner ecosystem. Our folks know the company and the environment, the partner staff tend to be more technically capable, but don't always know much about the company. Setting our CoE to be a one-stop for everything Astria helps partners get to work faster and accelerates time to value."
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Citizen Development at Bendigo and Adelaide Bank - Story - Success - Appian Community
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Citizen Development at Bendigo and Adelaide Bank
Summary
Bendigo and Adelaide Bank champions citizen development, empowering its non-technical staff to build applications through Appian's low-code platform. This initiative boosts digital transformation, enabling employees to directly enhance technology and customer service. The strategy underscores the bank's dedication to promoting a culture of learning and teamwork, thereby increasing operational efficiency and market responsiveness.
Featured Voices
Ben Boase
Service Owner, Workflow & Robotics
Snapshot
Industry: Financial Services
Headquarters:  Bendingo, Australia
Number of Employees: 7,000+
Website:
Bendingo Bank
Interview Date: July, 2021
Catalyst for Citizen Development
Q:
Why build a community of citizen developers? What does your program look like today?
A:
We’d been developing in Appian for several years and opening up to citizen developers seemed like the next logical step. This effort allows people closer to business problems to use Appian to address those problems versus go through us. Today, we have about 12 citizen developers who are active in the community.
Citizen Developer Qualifications
Q:
Can anyone be a citizen developer? To you, what makes for a ‘good’ citizen developer?
A:
In our business, the role best aligned with the requirements for successful citizen development is the Technical Business Analyst. These folks might not have deep programming expertise, but they all have excellent analytical capabilities and some degree of technical skills. They are particularly good at problem solving and systems thinking. They know how to find inefficiencies in a process and come up with ways to use automation to make it better.
Supporting Citizen Developers
Q:
What types of support are you providing citizen developers? Similarly, what are the parameters or guardrails you’ve put in place?
A:
The first thing we do with people who want to learn Appian development is get them set up on Appian Community. From there, we point them to the online learning on Appian University: Appian Fundamentals training. We provide them support during their learning process through our CoE. We also provide them with access to a sandbox and a development environment. (Access gets more and more restricted the closer they get to production.) Also, we have an Appian community wiki and Teams channel for Appian development. New citizen developers have the ability to ask others in the community for help. Also, every 2 to 3 weeks, my team will lead an Appian discussion, which will always include our citizen developers. Here we will pick one topic (e.g. new release features) and go deep.
Our major control for citizen-developed applications is our solution assurance process. This includes a health check review, but also validation that good build practices have been followed, like the use of proper naming conventions, table structures, etc. Nothing gets released into production without this review, which my team conducts.
Lessons Learned
Q:
With respect to this program, what has worked well and where have you struggled? What advice would you give to others on their citizen development journey?
A:
Low code is not no-code. You need to understand how technology works. The people we target don’t necessarily have lots of programming experience, but they often have some computer science. However, technical aptitude is more important than experience. You might be good at Visio or Excel, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be proficient in Appian.
Success Measures
Q:
How do you measure the value generated by this program? What measures do you point to to prove success?
A:
We don’t have formal program success measures. But I would say the biggest indicator of success is the fact that several of the applications built by citizens (or in partnership between IT and citizens) are some of our most heavily used Appian applications. These are not small apps either: they automate meaningfully complex and important processes.
Another indicator of success is that the community is still growing. Most of our newer Citizen Developers came to us because they saw the success of their peers in other business groups in solving problems with Appian and they wanted to do it for themselves.
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Citizen Development at S&P Global - Story - Success - Appian Community
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Citizen Development at S&P Global
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Organization Overview
Industry: Financial ServicesHQ Location: New York, New YorkEmployees: 20,000+
Dylan FulmerDirector, Operation Enablement
Interview Date: June, 2021
Catalyst for Citizen Development
Why build a community of citizen developers? What are your key objectives for the program?
D.F: For us, Appian citizen development helps answer the question: ‘how do we scale?’ For a [central IT] organization our size, if we didn’t embrace citizen development, the alternative would take a lot of time or use a lot of money to build scale.
I knew citizen development was possible, because [we were] not deeply technical people before using Appian. At the same time, the demand from business units for more Appian apps was greater than we could supply. So we started pitching [citizen development] as a way for business units to build small apps that they wanted on their own. We continue to do the big stuff, but these projects are generally small in scope and wouldn’t otherwise be fully resourced. A grassroots campaign around the promotion of citizen development that would help business partners solve ‘real pain’ just made sense.
Citizen Developer Qualifications
Can anyone be a citizen developer? To you, what makes for a ‘good’ citizen developer?
D.F: Good citizen developers are people with actual problems that they need to solve - it’s a good motivator. We generally look for someone with a high level of intellectual curiosity and patience. They have to be okay to hit a brick wall and sift through it over time. Given the nature of our business, most folks now have some basic technical background which, while helpful, is not a requirement.
Supporting Citizen Developers
What types of support are you providing citizen developers? Similarly, what are the parameters or guardrails you’ve put in place?
D.F: Initially, to become a citizen developer, you had to go through our in-house Appian training program. After three rounds, we realized that it didn't scale and now folks just go to Appian’s free online training program. After they learn the basics, we assign a mentor to work with them on their project. Mentors are experienced Appian developers in central IT, but they never do anything for people, just coach and show the way.
We want to make sure people can continue to use the training they receive, so we’re building an Appian ‘alumni network’. This will be a forum within the business where individuals submit small projects and these alumni can help advise their colleagues across the company.
We are also working to provide the citizen developer community pre-developed pieces of functionality that will make their toolbox more robust.
Citizen Development Guardrails
What are the parameters or guardrails you’ve had to put in place? How is that different from ‘regular’ developers?
D.F: All citizen developers [and regular development teams] have to get architectural blessing before application go-live. Our CoE is still responsible for final deployment. This is usually not too big a barrier since the types of applications built by citizen developers are more internal-facing (collaboration across departments, request tracking, etc. - small scope projects that otherwise might not get funded).
Lessons Learned
With respect to this program, what has worked well and where have you struggled? What advice would you give to others on their citizen development journey?
D.F: So far, we’ve trained 60 people in just over 6 months; with 10% actively and regularly using Appian. Some advice and guidance to others who have not yet gone down the citizen development path:
Let people who are professional trainers actually do the training.
Don’t let your team get sucked into ‘taking over’ citizen project, especially when they run into trouble. Sometimes there just has to be ‘tough love’: people will figure out stuff when they have to.
Be really aggressive about expectation setting: for instance, we had to be 100% clear up-front that the CoE does not support their application once they build it. We will educate them on ‘how’ but we don’t own it.
Encourage honesty. It’s okay for a potential citizen developer to try it out and, after a while, if they decide isn't not for them, that’s ok.
What do you think about citizen development? Share your perspective in the comments below or email us at bestpractices@appian.com to schedule a research call with our team.
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Customer Case | Snijder Build New Portal in 4 Weeks | Betty Blocks
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Snijder Incasso Use No-Code to Develop the First Self-Service Portal in the Sector
Results
Made repayments much easier and more reliable
Secured new clients with the first self-service portal in the sector
Streamlined their entire repayment process
Let’s make a deal
Collection agency Snijder goes above and beyond in their commitment to customer satisfaction. In reality, debt collection can be a difficult field to navigate without a great deal of care being put into the systems and processes around it. This is exactly why Snijder has focused heavily on its customer services since it’s founding in 1995. Still, the company hadn’t yet been able to invest in digital transformation and the tools which come along with that. That is until frequent requests begun pouring in from potential customers asking for a self-service payment option.
“Everyone is different, everyone has a story which is precisely why we are out to understand and connect with individual stories. To do that, we needed Betty Blocks.”
Exacting requirements
One particular potential customer gave the company two strict requirements before signing on: That it should be possible for debtors to make payments online, and that this self-service portal needed to be operational within two weeks. Since developing an online portal with the security, payment, and database requirements of tools like this wouldn’t be possible through traditional programming, Snijder sought out a no-code solution.After doing market research, the company reached out to Betty Blocks to help build a custom system. Not only to build the service itself but help ensure that it would be compatible with their existing tools as well.
Development facts
By utilizing no-code and listening to actual consumer needs, Snijder was able to develop a brand new self-service portal in just 4 weeks. Over and above that, Snijder were the very first company in their sector to implement a tool like this for their customers.
Development time
4 weeks
Development hours
200
Building blocks used
140
The whole package
Betty Blocks was used to develop both the frontend and backend of Snijder’s self-service portal. The backend was seamlessly integrated with Snijder’s existing legacy system, Eurodossier, allowing for a smooth transfer of data between both the old and new systems. Making use of the existing systems helped ensure their users always have the most up-to-date information available which can be cross-referenced for total security.Since the information being shared with clients in the portal is obviously extremely private, Betty Blocks made sure that each user interacted with the system in a personalized dashboard. In the application’s frontend, users see a complete balance overview with options to make online payments from there. To help make the process easier, additional functionalities were added, such as the ability to contact a Snijder consultant directly, to help customers who had questions or difficulties.“Everyone is different, everyone has a story which is precisely why we are out to understand and connect with individual stories. To do that, we needed Betty Blocks.” - Leonie Snijder
Key features of the application
Online payment integration
Repayments can be made in just a few clicks
Compatibility with existing systems
Clients have a 100% overview of their current account
Personalized client dashboards
Information is privately displayed with options to chat with consultants
Innovation at work
As promised, the self-service portal was ready and online in 1.5 weeks! The speed of development and uniqueness of Snijder’s customized application made them the only agency in their sector to have implemented a self-service portal. Snijder as a company understands that customers don’t actively want to be a part of systems like these but through this application, Snijder has made the process a lot easier and much more bearable.
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Project Selection & Scoping at USF - Story - Success - Appian Community
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Industry: EducationHQ Location: Tampa, FloridaTotal Enrollment: 50,000+
Alice WeiSenior Director, Digital Transformation and Innovations
Interview Date: Spring 2022
Summary
The University of South Florida (USF) has been has been an Appian customer since 2015 and has three development teams across their organization. In this interview, USF’s Senior Director of Digital Transformation and Innovation, Alice Wei, reflects on her Appian project experience and shares lessons learned from her team’s Appian journey. This summary is based on conversations that occurred in the first quarter of 2022.
Characteristics of Early Appian Projects
Where's a good place to start when thinking about your first Appian project?
A.W: You’d be amazed how many organizations have parts of workflows that include manually tearing apart staples or sorting paper. Many organizations don’t view that as a huge first win when creating a product, but it creates speed and value right away. It’s also important to not make this about pointing fingers, it has to be about workflow improvement and removing bottlenecks.
What are some of of the most common project pitfalls you see?
A.W: One mistake I see is business partners focusing on dashboards instead of how people work. For example, they’ll want to integrate 7–10 different complex systems and have everything displayed neatly on a fully complete dashboard . . . and that’s most of what they focus on when planning an application. If you only focus on the shiny dashboard and integrations, there’s no path to value.
In our first project, we took a narrow focus and had a few complex integrations, but wanted to emphasize delivering value. You have to be okay challenging [business partners] to accept less than perfection—it’s okay to have blanks in your dashboard and then go back and fix them later on. Even further, the question that no one dares ask is ‘are you actually going to use that data or is it just going to sit there and look pretty?’ In the end, build something that’s going to deliver value and make sure it’s iterative . . . that’s a challenge.
How do you identify potential project areas?
A.W: It depends on how tapped into organizational goals you are. In education, for example, IT is often removed from what the University at large is doing. Goals are set very high and we need to interpret those in order to find valuable project areas. When we started with Appian, we used the state of Florida’s baseline metrics as a guidepost.
It’s important to listen to people on the ground. We talk to our deans, for instance. There’s a never-ending list of problems. So, we find a trusted business partner and work with them to pilot something in a safe space. For instance, we worked with the College of Medicine to automate several processes and prove value. They were working with a 16-person custom code shop that took at least six months to deliver value, but Appian was able to do the same work in just four weeks. Once we did that, we quickly got other investment requests from across the university.
Working with Partners and Sponsors
What characteristics do you look for in early project sponsors? How do you use initial wins to build momentum for future projects?
A.W: This can be really difficult as IT shops don’t always have a ‘seat at the table.’ We’ve had to be proactive with stakeholders about potential projects and prove success over several years in order to even earn our way to the table. When you’re first getting started, incremental success is okay; it naturally takes time to complete impactful projects.
Something that new people often miss is assuming that the power structure of your business partners is directly aligned to an organizational hierarchy. For example, at USF the provost is someone with a lot of organizational power. But, it was actually the deans reporting to him who were responsible for specific institutional goals. They had the most influence (funding, resourcing, etc.) to work directly with us. We listened for problems and worked with our deans to build solutions that helped meet their goals.
How did you use partners for your early projects? What lessons did you learn?
A.W: Picking the right partner, especially early on, is very important because not all partners are created equal. Some excel at implementation while others are better facilitators, which is particularly important if you’re both building new systems and upgrading your business processes. I’d recommend interviewing the person or team of people who will be on the ground working with you. Don’t be afraid to ask about their experience and workstyle to help inform how you’ll best work together. Also, Appian certifications can serve as a good guide for if they are up to date on Appian’s most current capabilities.
We’ve worked with a few different partners over the years but had a great experience with Appian Customer Success. For those early in their journeys, Appian provides a one-stop shop for not only development and delivery expertise but also facilitation of stakeholder meetings and ensuring the applications we build are clearly mapped to important university objectives.
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