Process driven or data driven task?

Process driven! Appian is meant to implement applications driven by business processes. A business process orchestrates the collaboration of people, data and systems. Assigning a task to a person requires management by due dates, escalations and exceptions. All of this is directly implemented OOTB in Appian. Why would you want to re-implement the wheel?

And yes, there are rare use cases where the task assignment concept in Appian does not fit. I first try to advice my clients to change heir approaches before I start building DB driven tasks.

I always try to go for 100% process driven at first and I'll make adjustments along the way depending on the user requirements.

Hello vaishal,

Appian's given approach is Process Driven and Stefan has explained it precisely. So we should consider that the best way is to use the process driven. But if you want to have a complete history of audits of your tasks, then you should go for data driven. Data driven will help you keep the record of all the tasks and all the information around the task and also minimizes the long lived process instances.

Sorry, but you can get all the data from a process driven approach. Just store the relevant pieces of information to database as the task is completed.

In my 13 years with Appian I only had a single use case I could not use a process driven approach for. User input tasks in Appian are a direct representation of a concrete and well defined human task in a process.

Hi Stefan,

Just curious on what was that scenario where you had to drop process driven approach and use data driven approach?

The challenge here was that we had to implement an extremely complex questionnaire where the content of a task could not be predetermined and could change at runtime. The assignment needed more very complex flexibility than Appian provides. Then we had the issue that the business process was not clearly defined in the way of how task completion could be enforced. This could not be solved on the business side so we had to avoid to have several 10000's of long running processes in the system.

BTW, long running tasks are easy to come by in Appian. But this needs cooperation from business. Check my post: appian.rocks/.../