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

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 celebration — 100 full-length epis...

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? Spoiler—it's more th...

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 episode into two (well, Episodes 99 ...

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? Remember $50 in 1979 is $222 today. ...

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 book about “Successful Process Mining P...

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 anyone will deny the benefits o...

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 (and especially the flavor of “Green ...

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 management and product marketing in the ...

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 enough. And I think it matured to a p...

Today we have our last “What's Your Baseline?” short during our little summer break. And this time we're looking at something special.

This is a Shorts about APQC and we had a long episode with Moritz Berger about what that framework is and all of those things. Moritz put in the APQC reference framework into a tool called The Brain.

What I really like with that and the short is mostly a demonstration of what he did a...

This week we release another What's Your Baseline? Shorts for you just to lighten up our summer break a bit. The topic is why simulation should not be in your process mining tool. And I'm fully aware that this is a controversial thing because people might think, “Well, it's convenient to have it in your process mining tool to do some what-ifs and move on.”



But I honestly think it's a bad decision because you're limited to your proc...

Today, we are re-releasing a “What's Your Baseline?” short from about two and a half years ago.

And the topic of today is how to create good dashboards. And I do not think about how to do this mechanically with your tool of choice. I'm thinking about what is the thinking behind it. That might be because I'm currently writing on the chapter about dashboarding and storytelling in my upcoming second book, “Successful Proce...

We are off for a few weeks, but instead of leaving you without your regular What's Your Baseline? fix , we decided to do something different this summer.

Since we started the podcast almost four years ago, we have grown quite a bit, and back in Season 2 we did a little "side show" and produced the "What's Your Baseline? Shorts" - 15 minutes, one topic, barely an edit.

And this week, we are re-releasing Shorts 1, in which we are disc...

The world is changing faster than one might think, or at least it appears this way … and nobody seems to do solution architecture anymore.

And plenty of organizations seem to have given up on planning what they are doing and changing in their system landscape, organizations, processes, etc. But that is wrong. You need to describe the changes so that you can agree on things and everyone is on the same page (and understands the di...

Some folks go to work and are drained before they even turn on their computer, and they cannot figure out why that is when all the aspects of the job seem to be fine — the tasks, the title, the money. What they don't see is that the managers might be the reason, and that the managers miss emotional intelligence — the ability to “read the room” — and cannot adjust their behavior (and therefore are “off”).

This challenge is why we spe...

Have you noticed transformation fatigue in your organization? The feeling that you run faster and faster, and have to do more with less, while you don't accomplish the results of the changes that you were out for?
Well, one aspect of that might be that you haven't “picked up” the folks in your organization where they are, and now they are working silently against the positive change that you want to instill. In the past, this was a ...

In many minds, legacy is “everything that works”. And even if that is not always true, many organizations look at their legacy systems and get a headache. How do you replace or update a set of systems that have served you so well over years or decades?

That is why we are speaking with our guest Kastin Deal about legacy modernization in this episode.

With over 8 years at Hitachi Rail, Kastin's expertise lies in spearheadin...

Having the “Oracle of BPM” on the show? Yes, please.
Even though our guest, Zbigniew Misiak, denies that, the role he is playing is an important one for our little industry. He is one of the few who bring together the different ideas and trends that are hot every year. We were genuinely interested in speaking with him about what he learned over the years and where he sees the ship sailing. And on top of it, he turned around the role...

We have spoken about Task Mining in the podcast before (see the “Additional information” section in the full show notes), but I haven't seen a lot of adoption of this technology in organizations — for multiple reasons that we will discuss.

However, when we got into contact with Tuhin Chakraborty from Mimica, we could not say “no” to speaking with him about their AI-driven approach to Task Mining.

Tuhin grew up in the Bay Area, which ...