How to Think About Appian Applications

Use this article to map your business needs to an Appian application before you start building individual components.

1. Data

Start with the information that's most important to you and your organization. Common examples are customers, orders, service requests, or assets.

Expose these critical objects as records to provide a single, consistent place to view this information.

Records can include data from within Appian and from external systems (relational database, web service, etc).

2. Process

Next, define your business processes. Think about how they interact with your records. If records are the nouns, processes are the verbs.

Use actions when there is no specific record involved initially (such as when creating a new record). Use related actions to act on a specific record.

Change can be initiated by users (action or related action), on a schedule, or by an external message/integration.

Use tasks to involve other people in a process. For example: a review or approval.

3. Reporting

With Appian managing your data and processes, build reports to aggregate metrics from across your organization.

4. Interfaces

Determine how users will access your application. Everything you build is shared regardless of whether they use Appian through Sites, embedded, mobile, or Tempo.

5. Platform

As you plan your applications, think about how they will interact to form a complete business platform.