What's Your Baseline? Enterprise Architecture & Business Process Management Demystified
Roland Woldt / J-M Erlendson
Recent Episodes
The end is near … no, not what you are thinking.
2024 comes to a close in about two weeks, and we also end Season 7 of the podcast. And a lot has happened — in the industry, with tools, changes in companies and the life of people in our small community.
Tune in to learn about our thoughts about what we’ve seen in the last year and an outlook for 2025. And there is also an interesting announcement in it 😉
In this episode of the What’s Your Baseline Podcast we talk about:
- Mergers & Acquisitions (and why they won’t stop in 2025)
- The use cases that we’ve seen the most
- Professional lessons learned
- Personal lessons learned
- Content creation in general, and What’s Your Baseline? specifically
- Other projects, like J-M’s BPM Walks or Roland’s The Digital Formula podcast
- Our outlook on 2025 for the industry and our podcast
- Roland’s “big announcement” and the request for people who like to help
Please reach out to us by either sending an email to [email protected] or leaving us a voice message by clicking here.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/whatsyourbaseline/support
How do you bridge the gaps between Strategy and Execution, and how do you evolve execution as strategy pivots? That are the questions that are the topic of our podcast this week - the first of two episodes of a collaboration with the "Strateg-ish" podcast, run by our friends Craig Overmars and Dan Marquez, who has been a guest on our show before.
This episode looks at strategy with the perspective that an architect might have - how is it done, what are the outcomes that one can align to, etc. In the second episode, which will be out on the Strateg-ish channel soon, we discuss the opposite side of this: what can strategists expect and what do they have to know when they are doing their work and expect it to be implemented.
Both, Dan and Craig, have a background in strategy and worked in various consulting organizations and are now working in this field at Google.
In this episode of the podcast we are talking about:
- Dan's and Craig's backgrounds
- What is "strategy" anyway (definition)
- How can it be developed in rapid-pace organizations?
- The process of strategy development
- The kind of artifacts that one can expect as an outcome of the development
- The typical timeframe of a strategy development project
Craig and Dan can be found on LinkedIn (of course) and their "Strategish" podcast can be found here: https://open.spotify.com/show/3h5l2eefFGb9YtPvUVnsDn?si=f8c690a4b197408a.
Please reach out to us by either sending an email to [email protected] or leaving us a voice message by clicking here.
GRC — three letters that scare a lot of people. So much that they like to avoid thinking of risks and compliance at all.
But don’t be afraid (quite the opposite), GRC can not only be an addition to your artifacts to make them better, they can also benefit to your program by “having the ear” of influential people in your organization … who, by coincidence, can generate budget out of nowhere, it seems.
And we are happy to welcome Michael Schank (again) who has worked in that space in the financial industry for years.
Michael is a distinguished thought leader and executive, specializing in addressing Digital Transformation and Operational Excellence challenges through his innovative, process-based framework. With over 25 years of experience in the Financial Services industry, he has primarily served as a management consultant, empowering clients with forward-thinking solutions in technology, process, and risk and spearheading large-scale business and digital transformations. Michael brings a powerful combination of superior sales and delivery skills, having personally sold and delivered over $100M in consulting services.
He is the author of the book, ‘Digital Transformation Success,’ in which he introduces his groundbreaking Process Inventory framework. This promises to be a transformative approach to achieving success in the digital era, unlocking unprecedented levels of operational efficiency and strategic alignment.
In this episode of the podcast we are talking about:
- Michael’s background
- Three lines of defense in risk management
- Integrated, business-oriented risk management
- How to create the foundation for this and integrate with performance data
- Involved teams and roles
- Why risk programs fail and teams struggle
- How to set up a program for success
- How AI and Digital Twins can help with the leg work
Michael can be found on LinkedIn (of course) and on his website at https://www.processinventory.com/.
Please reach out to us by either sending an email to [email protected] or leaving us a voice message by clicking here.
I know that this might be a cultural issue, but I don't see a lot of planning when it comes to projects anymore. Everything is "Agile" and I don't see that things are seen through that often.
Which is bad, because one of the promises of EA (and BPM) is that someone understands how things are wired up and what to change, so that you accomplish your objective - which should always be business-driven FWIW.
From my perspective this is a step back in the maturity of the discipline of Enterprise Architecture. And given the fact that the maturity was never high to start with, this is not a good development.
To help a bit in this situation J-M and I talk about EA use cases to give you some direction what you can do when you decide that this is a capability that you want to implement in your organization.
In this episode of the What's Your Baseline Podcast we talk about:
- Short (-ish) review of Episode 70 "BPM Use Cases"
- Recap of Episode 70 to set the context
- App/IT portfolio mgmt / rationalization
- Roadmapping
- Project portfolio mgmt / rationalization (looking at capabilities)
- Mergers & Acquisitions
- Operational resilience and disaster recovery
- Strategy
- Roles of architects
Please reach out to us by either sending an email to [email protected] or leaving us a voice message by clicking here.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/whatsyourbaseline/support
There was a big splash in the Enterprise Architecture tool market a few weeks ago - BizzDesign announced that they will merge with Mega and an unnamed third party (which we will learn about in Q4 soon, but cannot name here at this time). But why these two (three) players and why now?
Since we know some people in the industry, I reached out to Luca de Risi from Mega and we quickly came up with the idea of doing a show about Mergers & Acquisitions and not only talk about the current example, but also more generally about ownership models, how M&A comes together, and what that means for the involved organizations.
Our first guest doesn't need an introduction since he has been on the show already: Luca de Risi. Luca is Mega’s Chief Executive Officer and he held various leadership positions at the firm before that, like, being the country manager for the APAC business while being located in Singapore, or as Business Development Executive in the United States. He started his career as an internal auditor for a major French car maker before joining Mega.
Our second guest is Nick Reed, the Chief Strategy Officer of BizzDesign. He is a senior software and services leader with a successful track record of building and leading teams in high growth software technology companies. Strategy development and execution, M&A, value proposition development, strategic partnerships and analyst relations. Nick builds long term relationships with customers, with a relentless focus on business value and customer success and is a strong cross-functional team player, connecting the dots across sales, marketing, product, services and customer success for strategic initiatives.
In this episode of the podcast we are talking about:
- Luca’s and Nick’s backgrounds
- Forms of ownership and the impact on an organization’s strategy
- What are the reasons (and timing) to acquire another organization
- Criteria to check if you are a match
- Impact of a merger on customers and products
- What is the process of mergers and acquisitions
- What is the impact on the organization(s)?
- How is the product strategy affected?
Luca and Nick can be reached on LinkedIn. More detailed information about the merger is available here: https://bizzdesign.com/bizzdesign-merger-enterprise-transformation/.
Please reach out to us by either sending an email to [email protected] or leaving us a voice message by clicking here.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/whatsyourbaseline/support