What's Your Baseline? Enterprise Architecture & Business Process Management Demystified

Process and architecture folks excel at analyzing the as-is and optimizing it. But why? What if we skipped "As-Is" entirely and designed new processes from a fresh perspective? Scary? Our guest, Dr. Michael Rosemann, argues it's scarier to keep optimizing — because eventually you run out of things to optimize. Then what? Michael is the author/editor of twelve books in five languages...

When should you start with process and architecture in a startup? That was the question that we've asked ourselves (as if there is a real-life example currently happening :-) and then we thought, “Why not ask someone who is living in this space?” Vidar co-founded his first tech startup at 19 because he didn't know enough to know how hard it would be. 30 years on, he has gone mostly from st...

Roland and J-M go solo to pull back the curtain on something that's been years in the making: BPM OS , a purpose-built, local-first tool stack designed to help small, talented process and architecture teams stand up a real BPM practice — without the vendor dependency, IT overhead, or 12-month procurement nightmare. In this episode of the podcast we talk about: Most BPM programs fail not becaus...

Once you've sold the licenses you are done. Right? Well, not so fast, young Jedi. While the salesperson happily turns around and goes hunting elsewhere, the customer has high expectations about the treatment they get after the sale. Even today I see organizations who treat Customer Success teams as an afterthought and then wonder why they see churn or nastygrams from their customers. But it do...

Everyone says they hate compliance. But what they actually hate is being told the truth at the worst possible moment. The problem is not the regulation. It is the moment you involve the people who understand it. Too late, under pressure, with no room to course-correct. 65 to 95% of digitization projects fail. The answer is not to run them faster. It is to slow down enough to get them right — and t...

“Just go and show our tool in the best way possible.” I have heard this sentence wayyyy too often coming from a salesperson, and the solution engineer on the receiving end just died a little bit inside. Of course you want to make a good impression when showing your tools to your customer, but more importantly, you want to start building a relationship and engage with them. For that you have to get...

We teased it over the last couple of weeks when Roland posted about how to build products and when we started things like our Substack Now is the time to give you a look behind the scenes at how your favorite podcast turns the page from a hobby to a real business. And then there is also another welcoming change coming to you … that I guess most of you have missed over the last couple of episodes....

Business transformation programs rarely fail because of technology. They fail because the organization is not aligned, not clear, and not ready for change. There is an art, science, and emotional intelligence to leading successful business transformations, and our guest, Meherban Faroogh, has been helping clients for decades now to navigate this maze of major changes for organizations. He founded...

Is quality management the most thankless job in the organization? In many companies, QM teams want to be the Hermione Granger of the workplace—knowledgeable, prepared, and doing the right thing—but end up perceived as Argus Filch, the grumpy caretaker enforcing rules nobody asked for. This week's guest, Regina Haar, works at Q.Wiki (Modell Aachen), where she helps quality managers move from be...

Sometimes (always?) the problem that we see in organizations is not technology or structures or something else—it is the inability of people to “get on the same page.” One way to fix this is to have people dedicated to Business Architecture who understand “how things are wired up” and where the value is created. And who also tries to solve the problem that is shown above … what do you mean with wh...

One of the skills that I see an increasing demand for Business Analysts is data analysis. Especially when “new” tools like Process Mining shift the landscape towards data-driven analysis. And besides the need to learn these new skills, I also see multiple tools that are very pricey and might be cost prohibitive for some organizations, so they fall back to the universal Swiss knife in business… Exc...

Happy New Year! We are back from our regular break, in which we really did not do a lot for the podcast but were working on other things that you will discover throughout 2026. We are super excited about our plans, but it is not the time to talk about it … as we say in Germany, “lay the egg first, and then cackle.” However, for our first episode of Season 10 (who would have guessed that?), we have...

We had episodes about BPM education on the show before, but this time we speak with someone who is from a different generation than your regular hosts. And our guest Daniel Matka is building a “Process Academy” to bring process management knowledge to the next generation. And while doing this, he's building modern ways of structuring content that will speak to this audience. Daniel was a produ...

There has been a lot of consolidation in the process/architecture space in the last few years, mostly driven by PE firms. But why is that so, and why does it seem that there is no alternative to this business model? Back in the day there were foundations behind the companies, or they were privately held, and the only thing (besides a few smaller players you might not even have heard of) that I see...

To implement AI (and processes) correctly, you need good data. But what does that mean? Well, firstly it means that you can define your data product and to achieve that you need good data governance. But are we now in a super-nerdy topic? No, this is what we all do in some form or another … but in different fidelities and maturities. To shed some light on the topic of data governance, we invited A...

In this episode, we welcome Finnish enterprise architect and author Eetu Niem i to explore what it means to make enterprise architecture (EA) “lightweight”—practical, collaborative, and relevant in the real world. From frameworks to fiction writing, from ivory towers to coffee-fueled collaboration, this conversation dives into how to make EA actually work for organizations. With over 16 years of e...

Welcome to a very special episode of What’s Your Baseline? — where we demystify enterprise architecture and business process management. In this milestone 100th episode, we are joined by fellow BPM podcasters from Prozess Philosophen and BPM360 to celebrate, reflect, and talk about the wild ride of creating content in this niche space. In this episode of the podcast, we talk about: Milestone celeb...

Last week we took a deep(-er) look at what BPMN is today and pointed out the scope, difficulties, and misconceptions in the current specification. But what are ideas for improvements? I am glad that you asked, because this episode is exactly about this (with a slight twist to the business side of things). In this episode of the podcast, we talk about: Today’s topic: What should BPMN 3.0 look like?...

BPMN—”the” standard for process modeling and also the foundation for process automation using BPMS tools—is currently in its version 2.02, and that version was published in early 2014. Since then? Crickets. So, why haven't we seen an update of the standard? That is a big question and since we had such a blast talking about this topic we went wayyyyy overboard time-wise so that we are splitting the...

There is a thing that I have not seen managed well in today's organizations: business rules. Typically, they are an “afterthought” in implementations (because you have to feed the business rules engine and control the process flow). But how many organizations rationalize the underlying business rules on a larger scale? When was the last time the magic “above $50 and below $50” rule was looked at?...

Process Mining—a technology and technique that Gartner just called “early mainstream” in one of their last reports. But many people still don’t know exactly how to approach this thing. They listen to the vendors talking about technical integrations and all the fancy features, which—to be honest—can be pretty overwhelming for someone who is just looking at it. That is why Roland wrote his second bo...

We are hundreds of years into thinking about how we do work (insert your philosopher of choice here: Smith, Marx, Plato, etc.), but I get the impression that the most common style is “muddling through.” But why is that? Why has the concept of an Integrated Management System (IMS) not taken hold in many organizations? Is it too complicated? Too much effort? Not worth it? Even though I doubt that an...

Having lived in two cultures, it is so interesting to see how people cope with big problems. Climate change and sustainability are some of the biggest issues that we have to deal with in our lifetimes, and I see reactions from denial to aimless “do-gooder” activity. But how do you improve this situation and solve the problem to get to more sustainable business practices? Well, process management (...

We are back with our first episode of the brand-new season 9 of the podcast—and we are starting right into the topic of these days: AI … well, the AI hype that is out there. And we are discussing what you can do to avoid falling into the trap of falling for that hype. Our guest today is Maxwell Smith, who I had the pleasure of working with in a past life. He has years of experience in product mana...

Soooooo … We're a grown-up adult podcast now, and we're approaching our season 9. (Oh, so you claim.) If season 8 was great, will season 9 just be fine? More than fine. The world might be in chaos, but we are a safe harbor. Come join us, full of good friends, good cheer, and excellence in BPM and EA. And of course, even we are changing. So we resisted, for example, the AI topic for long en...