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

One of the major concerns in our discipline is that in an era of instant gratification and "easy button" demands from clients, the core fundamentals are easily forgotten. Our guest today, Roger Tregear, shares this concern and wrote a book about it: Elements. In it, he details the 20 elements that constitute a good Business Process Management (BPM) practice, and I highly recommend downloading and reading it. Roger’s career centers on consulting, writing, and speaking about process management. He helps organizations improve performance by designing and activating "perpetual improvement machines" through active process-based management. In this episode of the podcast, we discuss: Engineering and Telecom Origins: Roger shares his professional background, moving from electrical engineering and early data communications at ICL into strategic telecommunications consulting. The "Aha!" Moment with ARIS: In late 2000, Professor Michael Roseman introduced the ARIS tool to Roger, providing the formal language and framework for cross-functional concepts he had been exploring for years. Bonsai as a Process Discipline: Outside of BPM, Roger nurtures bonsai trees—a hobby requiring a daily, seasonal, and multi-year process framework rooted in patience and long-term planning. Why AI Cannot Replace Process Understanding: AI tools and automation cannot fix broken or misunderstood workflows. Without a foundational process structure, deploying AI agents only accelerates unpredictable outcomes. The Primacy of Cross-Functional Processes: While traditional organizations manage vertically via org charts, actual value, strategy execution, and customer experiences occur horizontally across functional silos. Management vs. Hope: Every organization operates via processes by default. The only strategic choice is whether leadership chooses to actively manage those processes or rely on hope. The "M" in BPM Stands for Management: The ultimate purpose of BPM is not modeling or documentation, but improving organizational performance in a tangible, measurable way. Defining Core Processes from Strategic Intent: Rather than relying on generic templates like "Order-to-Cash," core process architectures should be built by analyzing the organization's explicit strategic promises to its customers and stakeholders. Overcoming Executive Resistance to "Busy Work": To prevent leadership from dismissing BPM as an endless flowcharting exercise, teams must set clear guardrails, focus on high-impact areas, and avoid building bloated internal bottlenecks. Pruning the Architecture (Starting Small): Building a working three-level process architecture takes only a few weeks. Implementation should immediately focus on piloting three manageable, high-priority processes rather than attempting to govern hundreds at once. Targeting Process KPIs (PKPIs): Effective process governance requires distinguishing vertical functional metrics from horizontal Process Key Performance Indicators that measure how the overall workflow satisfies key stakeholder expectations. Focusing on High-Impact Processes: Organizations should avoid modeling every process to the lowest level. Deeper analysis and governance should be applied strictly to the top 20–30 high-impact processes driving major outcomes or risks. Process Transformation is Social: Successful BPM implementation depends less on tooling and technical diagrams and more on engaging operational staff, earning buy-in, managing human change, and empowering teams. You can find Roger on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rogertregear/. Please reach out to us by either sending an email to ⁠[email protected]⁠ or signing up for our newsletter and reading articles about process and architecture on our Substack … Go and subscribe at ⁠whatsyourbaseline.substack.com⁠. And if you like to support “the little podcast that could,” become a Patron at ⁠https://www.patreon.com/c/whatsyourbaseline⁠. We appreciate you!

It is about time—we took a (very) long summer break filled with travel, a new webinar series, and new and updated apps from What's Your Baseline? :-) Oh, and crossing that 75,000 download mark and celebrating our fifth anniversary—all in this month! But now we are back in the saddle, as they say, and we are starting Season 11 with a conversation between J-M and Roland, in which we dive into our shared painful experiences of process programs who have failed in on or another way. And the graphic below will give you the seven main reasons that we've seen in an overview. But without further ado, in this week's episode of the podcast we are talking about: BPMOS Updates: Roland highlights the release of new BPMOS apps and use cases covering learning and enablement, SDLC from requirement to implementation, planning and procedure factory exercises, and tool selection. The Root of All Evil: The hosts establish that practice failures almost always stem from people making poor decisions, setting up major categories like strategy, structure, governance, technology, and process. Financial Institution Redux: J-M shares a story about a major North American financial institution that struggled with employee happiness initiatives because "too many cooks in the kitchen" forced 30 different capabilities instead of a core MVP. Winning Through Jealousy: To fix the financial institution's fractured program, the team focused on making a single lead stakeholder look exceptionally successful using clear dashboards and KPIs to spark community engagement. The 10-Second Login Disaster: Roland shares a horror story of a healthcare company that bought thousands of software licenses, only to see a 10% login rate with average sessions lasting 10 to 15 seconds due to a total lack of use case definition. Vendor Accountability: The software vendor experience proved that overselling without clear internal commitment or matching use cases leads straight to corporate blacklists and shelfware. Airline System Silos: J-M recounts working with an international airline where a major ERP re-implementation was restricted to a strict "project bubble," causing massive scoping failures when touching unmapped system interfaces. The Business Therapist: Navigating severe adversarial relationships between vendors and corporate clients requires consultants with high emotional intelligence to act as mediators and keep the project alive. Process Mining Roadblocks: Roland details a financial institution that loved process mining initial proofs-of-concept but ultimately stalled out because rigid 8-to-10-week data request cycles choked agility. Top-Down Power: The lesson from the process mining hurdle is that bottom-up enthusiasm is great, but getting data and capabilities moving requires the backing of executive “big guns." The Lifer Employee Challenge: Working with decades-long corpor“lifers” who reject new methodologies requires understanding their unique values and reaching out early to secure true buy-in. Whiteboards vs. Repositories: The hosts lament seeing critical organizational processes mapped solely on office sticky notes, physical whiteboards, or locked filing cabinets rather than a digital twin repository. Summary of Failure Pillars: The episode wraps up by reiterating the core pillars of failure: strategy, people alignment, technology choices, process sustainment, structural design, governance, and value achievement. Please reach out to us by either sending an email to [email protected] or signing up for our newsletter and reading articles about process and architecture on our Substack … Go and subscribe at whatsyourbaseline.substack.com. And if you like to support “the little podcast that could,” become a Patron at https://www.patreon.com/c/whatsyourbaseline. We appreciate you!

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 and over 400 refereed papers. He's globally known for his work on BPM maturity models, context-aware BPM, process innovation, rapid process redesign, affective process design, and process modelling quality. He's presented at major global BPM conferences and delivered keynotes in 30+ countries, with research funded by Accenture, Cisco, Infosys, PwC, Rio Tinto, SAP, and Woolworths. In this episode, we cover: From efficiency to opportunity. After decades of classic BPM work, Michael pivoted from cost-cutting toward "crafting desirable futures" — partly sparked by his father asking if making companies more efficient was really the legacy he wanted. Three drivers of change: urgency (a burning platform), curiosity (testing the unknown), or ambition (a clear destination). Leaders without any of these stay "big, fat and happy" — and stuck. Root cause analysis of success, not failure. Instead of diagnosing what's broken, Michael's team studies "positive deviants" — top performers — and replicates their hidden practices org-wide using process mining. The seven types of opportunity (a counterpart to Lean's seven wastes), including "first data advantage" — examining what data your process already generates and who else might value it (e.g., an airline offering pet-sitting because it already knows who's traveling with pets). Process expansion, attention, and generalization — three opportunity types illustrated by Domino's "pizza tracker" (monetizing attention) and Uber's expansion from people to pizza, patients, and produce. "Lot size of one." The goal isn't catching up to best practice — it's building processes so unique that no competitor, and no design thinking exercise, could replicate them (e.g., QUT's "upgradeable degree" concept). Opportunity appetite statements. Just as organizations have risk appetite statements, Michael argues they need the opposite — a deliberate statement of which opportunities they're willing to pursue, partly modeled on NASA's approach to balancing risk and ambition. Make the future tangible. Example: a six-minute video imagining a trauma patient's full recovery journey in 2033, used to rally stakeholders around a shared vision instead of incremental fixes. RX, EX, TX — Revenue Design, Emotional Experience, and Trust Experience. A framework for evaluating opportunities beyond pure transactions, including "transactional benevolence" (e.g., Netflix pausing billing for inactive subscribers, or a retailer refunding a price drop you didn't know about). Reframing the business case. To win leadership buy-in for trust- or future-focused initiatives, Michael suggests shifting from short-term cost to long-term opportunity cost — the price of not acting. AI as a thinking partner, not just a tool. Michael previews a prototype built with SAP Signavio that uses AI to proactively surface opportunities from an uploaded process model — "reverse prompting," where the tool greets you with an idea instead of waiting for a problem. The Future's Triangle. A framework for organizational inertia: the weight of the past, the distraction of the present, and the pull of the future — and why most companies only operate on the first two. Find Michael on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/michaelrosemann/ Reach us at [email protected] or subscribe at whatsyourbaseline.substack.com. Support the show on Patreon: patreon.com/c/whatsyourbaseline.

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 startup to startup, usually as the first technical hire or a co-founder. He has both bootstrapped and raised VC capital and recently spent 3 years working at a VC fund. He now runs a tech consultancy focusing on the intersection of DevOps and AI while working on his next big thing. In this episode of the podcast, we talk about: A startup is defined by pre-revenue or pre-profit status combined with rapid growth ambition — a chip shop is operational from day one, not a startup. Once you're profitable and growing modestly, you're a lifestyle business. Early-stage capital is the most expensive capital you'll ever spend, because you're paying in equity. The earlier you are, the larger the slice of the company you trade away for the same dollar amount. VC investors expect most of their portfolio to fail and are only looking for the 10x–100x outlier. If you can't raise your next round within about 18 months, their interest moves on — so failing fast and validating quickly is the entire game. AI has dramatically lowered the barrier to building a working prototype, letting founders show investors something tangible and compelling much faster than ever before. But the industry is swinging back hard toward upfront specs and documentation, because AI coding agents can't infer your unique business context. Writing a truly good spec turns out to be one of the hardest parts of the entire software development process — and most teams have been skimping on it for 25 years. Your truly proprietary assets are your ideas, processes, use cases, and customer segments. The generated code is a commodity — everyone building on the same AI tools has access to the same output. Lightweight processes pay off quickly once a startup begins to scale. The absence of basic QA, project management, and clearly written tickets is almost always what causes delivery to break down first — not the process itself. A common and costly mistake is over-engineering: developers building for 10 million users when the total addressable market is 10,000. This happens when engineering teams are never told what the product actually is or who it's actually for. Process and architecture function as a communication layer — aligning engineering, sales, and leadership around a shared vision, the customer they're serving, and the strategy connecting the two. It builds buy-in, and buy-in produces better work than a paycheck alone. Vision must be communicated continuously from the hiring process onward, not just stated once and assumed to stick. Developers detach from the "why" quickly when daily work becomes purely tactical. Both one-on-one check-ins and group meetings are essential to a healthy team. People rarely surface real blockers, interpersonal tensions, or technical concerns in group settings — individual conversations build the trust that makes those things visible before they become crises. Vidar can be reached on LinkedIn here and also has a website: hockstadconsultng.com. Reach out by emailing ⁠[email protected]⁠ or subscribe to our newsletter and articles on Substack at whatsyourbaseline.substack.com.

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 because of bad content, but because organizations treat it as a pure IT exercise — buy a platform, check the box, and wonder why nothing sticks. The three pillars every BPM capability needs are content, governance, and adoption — yet most organizations only address the first one. Knowledge rented from consultants or SaaS vendors disappears the moment you stop paying; BPM OS is built on the principle that you own it outright, forever. BPM OS targets three groups: small internal teams doing more with less, consulting organizations that want baked-in methodology for client delivery, and vendors looking to bundle a white-labeled practice layer with their platforms. Groundwork is the brainstorming and planning app — dump ideas onto a canvas, sort them into zones, and shift into structured planning mode with priorities and rough timelines. Playbook is a lightweight wiki for capturing structured knowledge, course profiles, stakeholder analyses, and methodology documentation — with templates so you never start from a blank page. Atlas generates visual subway maps of your learning curriculum or capability landscape, complete with time-sensitive station states, deprecation indicators, and links back to Playbook pages. Outline lets you define the detailed content structure of a course or deliverable in a hierarchical, mind-map-style view — moving from “What do we need to teach?” to "Exactly what are the chapters and items?” Course Flow is a Kanban-based project management tool for developing and iterating on courses, complete with a built-in feedback form, an inbox for triage, and a status dashboard across all active projects. Cadence is a personal (and optionally team) task planner organized by day and category — with recurring daily items, carry-forward of incomplete tasks, and a simple velocity metric to spot overload before it becomes a crisis. The entire stack runs on Node.js, saves files as Markdown and JSON (no database required), plays nicely with Google Drive or OneDrive for backup, and optionally connects to GitHub or GitLab for full version history. Apps interoperate through lightweight linking and import/export — cards from Groundwork flow into Atlas, tasks from CourseFlow export into Cadence, and every Playbook page carries a permanent link that works anywhere in the stack. Find out more and download your free personal copy of Cadence at whatsyourbaseline.com/bpm-os—and check the episode show notes for a PDF overview of all six apps. Reach out by emailing ⁠[email protected]⁠ or subscribe to our newsletter and articles on Substack at whatsyourbaseline.substack.com.