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

Some organizations seem to perform better, create results faster, and the people in those organizations seem to have fun on top if this? But how can that be when you are currently stretched in all directions and don't know how to get stuff done? In this episode we are talking with Amy Levine, who is an expert in neuroscience and how it impacts high-performance teams and the leaders (and their lead...

Hey J-M, what do think when you hear the word “seven”? Well, maybe the seven wonders of the world? Seven rings? Seven deadly sins? My favourite song by Ariana Grande? Hmm, these are all good ideas, but how about a Season 7 of the What’s Your Baseline podcast? No way, what do we have in store for this season? A mix of interviews and topic shows, just as in all of the last seasons. But we also will...

Some organizations are like a ticking time bomb when it comes to their processes and (IT) architecture. "The old guard" is about to leave the organization in masses (and sometimes not voluntarily) and a lot of knowledge about how things are wired up - which is what architecture is all about, right? - will leave as well. And not too many organizations are prepared for this, and rather pre...

How do I get started? What is the first thing that I look at? Who will be my allies? What do I need to put in place? When you are tasked to build a brand new Business Architecture practice in an organization that has not had one before is a challenging task. When you have to do this in a 60-year old organization in a field that is relatively unique on the market, that might be even more challengin...

"I just bought your tool, now you have to tell me what I can do with it". No kidding, that is what one client to said to me once. Well, here is a starter for you - in our latest episodes we are talking about the use cases for Business Process Management (not all of them, because we have that self-imposed limit of an hour-ish length for each episode). In this episode of the What's You...

Why do some applications have a large following and their revenues soar, while others are struggling with making a sale and are virtually unknown? Or why do you struggle with building internal acceptance for your program? One reason might be that the former companies were able to build a community that includes not only users (and ends up being a glorified help desk), but also people who are convi...

AI is *the* hot thing these days and you cannot pass any tool that does not have these two characters attached to it. That is also true for the BPM space, and this week we have the pleasure to speak with a person who is working in this space for over 20 years and his tool has built in AI already, while other vendors are still thinking about how to integrate it in their stack. The guest in this epi...

The age old question: how do you make your processes "evergreen". Well, one way is to update your models on a regular basis (for example to comply with regulations), but is that really "the process" or is it just a picture of it? Your processes come to life when someone performs them and for this you need to be able measure them. To support the process execution you can use an...

You have chosen to start your BPM journey and are now asking yourself the question "how *DO* I get started?". Well, one way is to look at a BPM Adoption Framework, the other is to ask someone who has done that before. We are lucky to speak with someone who fulfills both criteria - our guest today is Caspar Jans, who also already has been a guest in an earlier episode on the show before :...

This episode closes out the mini series about data, and this time we talk about data modeling. Data models are some of the things that I have seen the least often in projects over the last two decades. Why is that? Is it because it is too geeky, or not interesting enough compared to, say, a process model in BPMN? But being clear about data is important when it comes to designing solution architect...

A lot of projects are just looking at processes and applications. One thing that typically does not get the limelight is the data that is needed to empower these two things. But why is that? Is it because data is "invisible" and cannot be touched or felt? Our guest today is Wiebke Apitzsch, who is working in "data" for over 15 years with companies like the Boston Consulting Gro...

As we all know, the majority of time in a process mining project is in some form or fashion related to data preparation and a significant lower share of time is spent on the actual analysis. There are multiple ways of getting you data into shape (SQL, visual data modeling tools, etc.), but our guest today has developed an approach and a tool to flip this time relation and shorten process mining pr...

This episode is a first for the podcast - we are not talking about something from an external perspective, but speak with someone "in the trenches" who is actively implementing BPM in an 160-year old organization. Our guest today is Martin Holling, who is working at Kemna (a road construction company in northern Germany) and who has worked at Siemens, as well as a consultant in the BPM s...

We had a couple of episodes where we discussed the Solution / Process Lifecycle, but this time we look at it from the perspective of Business Process organizations. What we see is a distinction between the different disciplines that are needed to deliver a full solution and there are organizations that see a "them" and "us" between those. Unfortunately, I see a lot of these org...

Welcome to Season 6 of the What's Your Baseline Podcast! We’ve got another fascinating season coming up, chock full of emerging trends and leading voices from the EA and BPM space. We will be talking about customer success stories, architecture topics like “data”, and also about how to make YOUR program a success. See you there!

We are wrapping up Season 5 of this  podcast  with an episode that I was looking forward to for quite some time now – we are talking about operational intelligence. What is that, you might ask. Well it is the insights into what your complex organization does by using technology and measuring the important things, while making them visible for you as a decider when you need to take not only the “bi...

You might have heard it in the last episode of the podcast ( Ep. 59: Process Inventory ), that our guest Michael Schank has written a book ;-) That triggered two things with us - first, making a WYB Shorts about the process of writing a book and become a published author, and second, nudging Michael for a giveaway of three books to some randomly drawn winners. To win, you need to do two things: Fo...

How do you plan your transformation? By looking out of the window or asking your two best friends? Or would it be better if you had an overview of all the things that your organization does - in the form of a process inventory? Michael is a distinguished thought leader and executive, specializing in addressing Digital Transformation and Operational Excellence challenges through his innovative, pro...

Last week's episode of the podcast was a very good conversation about learning and enablement with Ron Cohen, Peter Dern, and Adam Egger, and we could have talked for hours about this topic. However, the conversation took quite a turn after I asked how the future of learning will look like. But we also were at the top of the hour and we didn't want to cut it out unheard. The solution to th...

How do you set up learning and enablement for your architecture/process people? What has changed since the days of instructor-led training, and where will the field of enablement go into the future (hint: it might be creepy for some of us). In this episode of the What's Your Baseline? podcast we are looking into the field of learning and enablement and discuss this topic with three experts of...

You bought the tool and now the most critical question for your success comes up: “Now what?”. This leads to these questions: what you can do in the tools, what can you expect, and -maybe most importantly- what do you do after you’ve done a part of the analysis. You also need to have a “meta process” on how to approach a Process Mining project. These are all the topics that we are talking about in...

Implementing a tool or standing up a new capability can be a complex task. Standing up a Center of Excellence as part of this implementation can help ease the pain for new users. However, it is not always clear what a CoE shall do and how it is integrated into an organization (or where it is located in the org structure). In this episode we are talking with Thi Nguyen about exactly this topic, and...

The way how we communicate and learn has changed over the last couple of years. One contributing factor is podcasting (or videocasting - we are no purists over here at  What's Your Baseline? ). By now there are tons of excellent podcasts about Business Process Management, Process Mining, and Enterprise Architecture out there free of charge for you. We thought that it was a good idea to look at...

This is another What's Your Baseline? Shorts episode and we are following up with the guest from our last episode, Moritz Berger. Moritz took the APQC Process Classification Framework and imported it into "The Brain" to visualize the breakdown and connectivity of processes to each other. Since this Shorts consists mostly of a demonstration, you might want to watch at it on Spotify, Y...

We spoke about frameworks and reference content as accelerators in a previous episode (listen here ), but one of those is pretty popular here in North America, so that we have a deeper look into the APQC Process Classification Framework today. We are talking with Moritz Berger about the ins-and-outs of APQC, and will extend this conversation with another What's Your Baseline Shorts in a week f...