Is Appian Case Management a framework or just a coding style?

Generally-speaking, the core of Appian has been Processes and Records for at least 10 years, and Appian's Case Management Studio blends the two in a way that allows non-technical people to manage some of the Case metadata / administrative things. In the Case Management Studio sense, Appian is a 'native framework'. Yet using basic Appian, developers can effectively code from scratch most of what CMS does, deciding whether the cases are database backed or a hybrid of process & database-backed.

From the hands-on demos that I've played with, Case Management Studio is a way for the business (not Appian developers) to stand up

1. The Case definition - what is a case, and what information should be collected as part of a case at various milestones of a case 
2. What tasks are associated to each case, in what order, and what are the SLA's
3. Who is allowed to perform actions on a case (e.g. upload documents or trigger automations that process a case), and see various bits of data

While I've worked with Appian projects for a long time, I've seen the backends, devops, and a few project lifecycles of Salesforce, Palantir Foundry, and Appian; they could each be portrayed as both a Case Management system and just a DB-driven workflow system in various contexts. Salesforce is more native framework with limited customizability. Foundry is definitely just a database-driven linked list of tasks built in custom code with very few 'native' case-specific elements.

If you help us understand what "true case management" means to you, folks will give you an honest assessment of whether that's baked into Appian CMS or if it's custom development. For example,

• Automated case creation / updates from another system (via REST) are very common things that an Appian developer would implement on top of Case Management Studio
• Appian has a reporting layer (Process HQ) that is separate from Case Management Studio but inherently follows the security rules of the Case configuration without needing extra code to do so. So if that's something you expect to be part of case management then it's available, indirectly
• Appian has Record Events which are a great start for audit trails, but do not fully account for every need that the business might have of an audit trail. So there may be a bit of extra development needed there, mostly backed by trigger events from process in order to store into the database.

Appian does have best practices for CMS, but they are generally built into the online learning courses.

Thanks, Jesse — I really appreciated your detailed breakdown of how Appian Case Management Studio blends Processes and Records, and how developers can build similar behavior from scratch.

One thing I’m still trying to clarify:
In both the CMS framework and custom implementations that follow the record-centric pattern, does Appian still rely on its native process engine for user task creation, assignment, and SLA tracking, using standard task reports and process monitoring tools?

Or, in these newer data-driven architectures, do some teams replace that with custom record-based task tracking — effectively moving human task ownership out of the Appian process engine and into the data layer?

I’m trying to distinguish whether “data-centric” in Appian means the case data lives in Records but the task lifecycle still relies on Appian’s engine — or if the entire task management concept shifts to custom database logic.

Thanks, Jesse — I really appreciated your detailed breakdown of how Appian Case Management Studio blends Processes and Records, and how developers can build similar behavior from scratch.

One thing I’m still trying to clarify:
In both the CMS framework and custom implementations that follow the record-centric pattern, does Appian still rely on its native process engine for user task creation, assignment, and SLA tracking, using standard task reports and process monitoring tools?

Or, in these newer data-driven architectures, do some teams replace that with custom record-based task tracking — effectively moving human task ownership out of the Appian process engine and into the data layer?

I’m trying to distinguish whether “data-centric” in Appian means the case data lives in Records but the task lifecycle still relies on Appian’s engine — or if the entire task management concept shifts to custom database logic.