Source
r/Appian•
Metailurus

How Customisable is Appian?

So, as usual, I'm going to get an off the shelf product that some bigwig bought via the usual delusions of quick development turnaround they bought into from the sales pitch. This time it happens to be Appian.

These "low code" solutions are usually fine if you are doing something fairly standard in your business with few integrations. Not so fine when you have open ended processes that need a bunch of features that the vendor hasn't included and wouldn't understand as they become white elephants very quickly, enhancement budgets suddenly dry up for and they wind up on life support, serviced by some poor sod who ends up chained to the platform and their career progression gets bludgeoned to death as a consequence.

My question for this subreddit is: On a scale of 1-10, with 0 being very annoying and 10 being very easy, and PEGA being a reference point of 5; Is this platform easily customisable compared to PEGA?

We have a PEGA solution on our plate right now, and to be blunt about it, it's oversold and overpriced junk. I'm hoping to avoid the same with Appian, but on first brief review of what we have at the moment, I suspect the inevitable.

Posted Sep 9, 2020, 11:23 AM UTC · edited

111
zhanovichAppian Engineering•

Working in Appian little over 3 years now and I would say that Appian can fulfill most of the business needs. It all comes down on level of what you consider custom. There are some projects that are perfect fit for Appian and some that are too complicated to be handled in Appian. Most of the crazy requirements I have seen that were not possible in Appian in my opinion were over complicating things for the end user. Appian is a nice tool if you or someone else have a good amount of experience in building applications from scratch, otherwise it will be very close to nightmare and anyone will hate it

5
MetailurusOP•

Thanks

I've got a mix of off-the-shelf and in house stuff in my particular area. Other than an in-house system (in .NET) that's fairly fundamental our business, the rest of my current estate constitutes a bit of a dumping ground for systems that have fallen out of favour at some point but are still needed in some fashion.

My preference is to have my guys build things from scratch as I generally find that vendor supplied platforms have too many restrictions and nuances (both functional and licensing based) around how we want to use the system and the data behind it.

To add some context on custom development/product split, with PEGA the implementation we have ended up using about 20% of its out of the box capability vs 80% customisation, and I wouldn't be surprised if the same happened here as in my cynical experience these products tend to be bought as being the "new shiny" rather than based on consideration around what actually needs developed. There will be some crazy requirements, and I will be pushing that angle when I have to negotiate for resource.

0
zhanovichAppian Engineering•

From my experience I would say there are some applications in the AppMarket but I would say with 95% confidence you will not use it and end up building solutions from scratch. 2-3 experienced (1-2 years) developers should be able to deliver any medium size project in 1 PI (3-4 month). I would say the experience with Appian will solely depend on the developers and their experience with Appian. I would caution about letting experienced non Appian developers building applications on their own, from what I have seen it never ends well. If you can get couple of seasoned Appian developers and that should be enough to kick start the Appian platform. Let me know if you have any specific questions

1
yankeehooCertified Platinum•

There really is nothing "out of the box" with Appian. It's just a set of tools to build process models, user interfaces and integrations. i've worked with Pega in the past and I know the trap you are referring to. After being involved with Pega for one project as an integrator, we got the hell out of there, and found Appian as a solid foundation to form a partnership.

It's definitely possible to push it outside it's limits, but you're not going to end up with an unmaintainable pile of spaghetti like you get with Pega.

3
blueboybobAppian Engineering•

Can't answer without knowing what you want to do. But with plugins written in Java I don't see any limits.

Now that assumes you are self managed install. Cloud installs don't allow custom plugins.

But again what are you trying to do?

2
yankeehooCertified Platinum•

That's not true. custom plugins work fine on cloud, they just have to be reviewed first.

1
blueboybobAppian Engineering•

yes, i should have said "its not as easy on cloud" or "you are more limited", but yeah custom plugins can work.

1
MetailurusOP•

Don't really want to go into the detail for anonymity reasons, however effectively we have existing implementation that at present appears to be basic workflow being transferred into my area (as the people who bought it didn't understand what they were buying, don't know how to take it further, and should never have been allowed to run with the ball).

I will ultimately need to spin up a project to build a lot of integrations to other platforms, mostly through a middleware layer, but it's going to include a lot of potentially fiddly stuff like spacial data and embedding a view onto a tile map server, potentially drawing things onto that view in a way not dissimilar to a GIS application. I need to cover the hosting setup with the area it is exiting as a priority by the sounds of things (good call out, thanks).

Effectively a lot of the custom stuff will be data heavy screens that reference other platforms and generally involve some kind of update going either way, and amending various variables against that data will need to be able to inject into any structured workflow that's been designed.

My experience with PEGA was that my team were fighting with the application to shoehorn in changes that were needed, rather than PEGA being something that facilitated rapid development. The risk for me is that I have the same battle with Appian when it would probably in reality be easier to build a workflow tool around the other capability.

0
blueboybobAppian Engineering•

Between embedded interfaces, integrations (built in and custom) and java plugins I dont see anything there that you can't do

3
MetailurusOP•

Thanks.

The proof will be in the pudding I guess.

0
jaiberman•

I found it as very proprietary and not many information as share across the board to the developers, by Appian and its Engineers in my best belief for their own benefit than the customer need.

Documentation is pretty okay to some extend and rest is any ones guess. And examples are scant and not beyond the basics, hard to get any real world examples.

2