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

Process Management has a bad reputation of downsizing, replacing humans with bots, and all those other things that one relates to "bad capitalism". But there are also other ways to include humans into process management that are outside of these parameters. And, believe it or not, you still need humans to analyze, design, and improve processes. Today we are talking with Christoph Piller...

Sometimes you have to mix up things a bit and come down to the level of practicality ... in this case we are looking at process-bility in this week's episode of the podcast. What that is? Oh, it is the approach to process modeling that our guest Kevin Tan has developed. Kevin is an accomplished Business Process Analyst with more than 20 years of global experience gained through roles in Austra...

We had the topic of today's episode - transformation - a couple of times on this podcast , even though we did not call the episodes like that. But why? Because transformation in today's times is not an exception but the reality for all organizations. It is not just "an update by IT", or something that is a "one and done". We all need to change and transform our organiza...

Some topics seem to be a "stretch too far" for this podcast , and the topic for today's episode seems to be one of those: Sustainability. But is it? Yes, Sustainability -or the lack of it- is a global problem, that manifests itself in climate change, social restructuring, and many other forms. But it also becomes a topic that organizations have to adjust to in their business practice...

Welcome back to the What's Your Baseline? Podcast. We are starting our Season 5 (who would have guessed that?) next Monday, July 31, with our 50th episode about Sustainability. We can't wait to hear back from you :-)

Welcome to the last episode of our podcast in Season 4 (no worries, we'll be back for a Season 5). Today we are talking about Customer Experience Management, which is complimentary to BPM and EA. The key difference is that Customer Experience Management has an outside-in perspective on things, versus the inside-out perspective of your organization, which many BPM groups try to capture and mana...

We have spoken about Process Mining and data-driven decision making quite a lot on this podcast . But does it stop with mining processes? I think the next step is growing this field of data analysis to "Enterprise Mining" where the same idea will be applied to apps, data, orgs, risks, etc. And the idea is the same - get a factual basis from system records and then augment it with human i...

We are at the next step of moving our organizations to the digital twin which will allow us to monitor "the plane" (our businesses) in real-time and compare it with the predictions of the future. This missing step is Process Simulation, a "thing" that existed for years already and was widely underused. The change though is that the next generation of Process Simulation tools no...

Welcome to the next episode of our podcast . Today we are talking about Gamification, a topic that we are a bit critical towards, but which seems to be here to stay (it's a generational thing, I guess...). But the twist in this episode is how it influences the performance of your architecture or business process team. In this episode of the podcast we are talking about: What is a gamification...

Enterprise Architects? Aren’t those the useless people who always say “no”? That is one of the perspectives we have heard about EAs in the past. But what can EAs do and how do the progress from “noisy” to “influential”? In this episode of the  What’s Your Baseline? podcast  we discuss the role of Enterprise Architects and the changes to the discipline with Luca de Risi from Mega International, who...

When starting with process management one of the first questions is “what process notation shall I use”. In this episode of the What’s Your Baseline? podcast we discuss this question with Walter Bril, who is one of the co-inventors of the Universal Process Notation (UPN) and why it is not *really* important what notation you should use … it is more important which approach to Business Process Mana...

What are the needs of a small business compared to a larger one? Can they use the same approaches for process improvement and business process management? Shall they use the same tools? Yhis week we are speaking with an expert on this topic (and also a small business owner herself - Adi Klevit. Adi is running her own firm that has specialized on helping small organizations with process documentati...

I see a lot of separated efforts in organization, and model processes. Aren't these all connected activities that should be coordinated to create a *gulp* architecture that carries the load? But what is a "Business Architecture" and how is it different from just an assembly of processes? Are these terms synonyms or is there more to a Business Architecture than that? In this episode o...

If you have listened to a couple of podcast episodes you know that we are true believers in that the biggest "problem" in any architecture, BPM, or Process Mining project is not the technology or the processes and other architecture views - it is the people!  Getting people along with your change is the hardest thing to do and therefore we are happy to revisit the topic of&nbsp...

Developing a strategy for your organization seems like a mystery for a lot of people (and some organizations make a large coin from keeping that mystery), but in all reality it has a big part of “wild guesses” included. In this episode of the What’s Your Baseline Podcast we have Dan Marquez on the show, who knows a thing or two about this topic from his time at Accenture, Boston Consulting Gr...

A lot of people think that the work is done when they have a process be visualized  in their process mining tool and a nice dashboard is built. Nothing could be further from the truth and our guest today, Sebastian Kotulla, talks with us about why that is. To bridge the gap between visualizing data/information to knowledge as the result of the analysis Lean techniques can be applied. Sebastia...

Welcome to Season 4 of our podcast . Today we are talking about Solution Engineering, aka Presales, and what you can expect from your vendor's solution engineers (vs. their consultants). In this episode of the podcast we are talking about: What is a Solution Engineer? What is their primary job focus and their scope of work and process? What are Consultants (and are they different from Solution Eng...

Today we have a special What's Your Baseline Shorts episode for you, that has nothing to do with Enterprise Architecture or Business Process Management.   However, we think that you will like it: our guest today is Jeremy Voltz, an indie-soul musician from Toronto, Ontario, who is gracefully letting us use his music for all intros, outros, and intermissions. In this episode we are talking wit...

Welcome to another episode of our podcast . In the final episode of the final season for this year, we are talking about another ten things we’ve learned over the years: How to do things Transparency is more important than ever Strategic alignment is key to your success Sometimes you have to say “no” to requirements Make clear from the outset how a project’s success is measured Tools BPM/EA tools...

There was a lot of buzz around Lean and Six Sigma back in the 80s and 90s, but not today anymore. However, the practice is not dead and it is still relevant and used in many industries today. And there are good reasons to take a step back and have another look at why it was so successful and what of the practice still creates value and should be included in your process improvement and proces...

Welcome to another episode of our podcast . Today we are talking about what to do before, during, and after process discovery and design sessions. In this episode of the podcast we are talking about: Before the session - Identify what to change/purpose - Identify who to invite - Create strategic alignment - What to prepare During the session - How to structure a business architecture (> process...

Being the reasonable adult seems to be the parallel topic of this week's episode - even though the main topic is process automation. We were just so excited in our conversation that we got carried away  In this episode of the What's Your Baseline podcast we speak with Bernd Rücker. He is a software developer at heart who has been innovating process automation deployed in highly scalable and a...

A few weeks ago (in Episode 30 ) we spoke about how to select your process mining tool. And the conversation was so good, that we totally overran our planned time of an hour. But instead of leaving our thoughts about use cases for process mining, that are currently not implemented in standard process mining tools, we decided to use them as a What's Your Baseline Shorts episode. We are talking abou...

We talk (a lot) about technology and processes here on the podcast. But what about the human side of Business Process Management? Do we just forget them and aim for the desired outcome no matter what? No, we don't ... In this episode of the What's Your Baseline podcast we speak with Mirko Kloppenburg, who started his own company and project "New Process Lab" a few months ago after 20+ success...

Even given the fact that we are living in the 21st century, it is interesting to see that the percentage of women who studied technology or worked in the process industry actually decreased over time. Which is a sad state of affairs. So the question now is, how we -as an industry- can add more diversity and pick the brain pool of intelligent female professionals. In this episode of the What’s Your...