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Gregg Rock interviews George Barlow in April 2022. 

We are especially excited to let folks know that George is going to be presenting two of our newest courses that are part of the Digital Transformation Specialist series in our Summer Session 1 Training Event.

GR: George, you’ve been a BPM guru for a long time, and you also expanded the areas that you work in to include Decision Management, Case Management, and Automation Technologies. I was hoping that you could connect the dots for our Members to help understand what's coming down the Pike and what they can do to try to get up to speed with its current state of the art.

Do the math. We all spend a significant percentage of our lives at work. And, based on this poster by Charles Schwab and the state of the Government’s finances, we are all going to be working even longer. So as leaders it is our role to make sure that the lives of our staff are valuable and rewarding, if not fun.

People have incredible levels of drive, ability, and enthusiasm (as evidently clear by the videos that pop up in my social media feeds), and we need to harness that.

Thought: Why is happy hour just an hour and happens after work?

There has been a lot of research recently that is showing that (wait for it…) happy employees are more productive. I guess we knew that instinctively, but now studies are putting some data behind the feeling.

GR: What originally attracted you to the Business Architecture discipline, and what does Business Architecture mean for you?

SL: Well Gregg, to me gravitating towards Business Architecture has really been a natural evolution. My career started with an education in computer science, followed by a few years of software development, and from there I quickly realized that analyzing and distilling the customers requirements was a lot more interesting than coding the spec. And then, moreover, understanding the why behind the requirements, and that the needs that drove the requirements was even more interesting. Being able to correlate those needs with the customers business mission, business processes, supporting system, and data architecture while having that bird's eye view of the whole texture of the organization was extremely compelling.

…Sounds obvious, but it is more expensive than you know

Interestingly enough, the true cost of poor process is not in doing the process badly.  Clearly there is some cost there, but often it is the knock-on effect that the poor process has on other areas of the company, the downstream of the problem, which is the real cost multiplier. 

However, this is rarely calculated. If you have poorly documented and followed processes, you won’t even be able to identify the potential costs downstream—let alone measure them. (Note: processes must be documented AND followed to be valuable). So, like an iceberg, you only see a small part of the problem at surface level. Assuming an iceberg is a problem is looking at an iceberg from the Titanic’s rather than the penguin’s perspective.