End-to-End Strategy Execution

According to "Business Process Management Market Size & Share Analysis: Growth Trends and Forecast (2026 - 2031)", global spending on business processes will grow from $18.68 billion in 2026 to $30.26 billion in 2031. Most medium to larger organizations spend millions of dollars a year on business process work. This podcast episode discusses why runaway spending on this archaic practice is not only wasting money, but undermining the very value BPM purports to deliver. Too many organizations have fallen into the trap of assuming BPM practices must continue because they deliver ongoing value that benefits to customers, technology teams, and the business as a whole - a premise that does not hold up under scrutiny. In addition to shutting down this risk, this podcast episode will also promote a BPM alternative called dynamic rules-based routing that, when framed in context of business architecture provides a more agile approach to work management design that not only accommodates knowledge workers but delivers cleaner automated solutions using traditional or advanced approaches, like AI. Check out this episode to learn why your organization may be wasting millions annually on a practice that not only delivers little if any value, but undermines the very benefits it purports to promote.

Organization design is a long-standing discipline that has historically been described as the alignment of a company's structure, roles, workflows, and culture with its strategic goals. What does it mean when artificial intelligence (AI) introduces the ability to reinvent structure, change people's roles, and go beyond traditional workflow-based thinking. According to some sources, hierarchies need to flatten, roles that used to exist will be redefined or eliminated, and traditional process flows, which for way too long have constrained agility, need to give way to flexible real-time decision making. Much has been written on how to rethink organization design in the age of AI. Some of these writings sound very much like the cognitive enterprise I describe in my latest book, End-to-End Strategy Execution: From Inception through Solution Deployment. What has not been clearly articulated in much of the literature is what roles do business, data, and solution architecture play in enabling the shift towards a highly adaptive, learning organization. This podcast episode will explore these areas and see what organization design looks like in the AI-powered, cognitive enterprise built on formal architecture. It will also examine how AI itself can be provided the information to redesign outdated organization hierarchies, work management, and the roles people play. Join this podcast for a look into where organizations may be headed in the not-too-distant future.

There is growing concern and even more disappointment in the inability or unwillingness of business leaders to recognize the value of architecture and the teams responsible for defining and helping capitalize on those architectures. While not an entirely new phenomenon, the number and scope of situations where I hear of architecture teams being disbanded, disbursed, or just laid off entirely seems to be escalating. Those remaining keep getting cut out of the planning, impact assessment, future state envisionment, and initiative scoping work where they can make real impact. There are common threads in many of these situations but also enough variation to know it's a universal trend that is escalating in the worst of ways at the worst of times. This episode will address problematic architecture trends at a time when organizations need architecture more than ever. It will also provide specific guidance on how best to address these issues, before architecturally unconstrained deployments drive your organization into an even deeper hole. 

According to a recent survey, over half of customers say they stopped using a product or buying a brand because of a bad experience. Only four in ten customers say that their brand loyalty has grown over the years. Yet nine in 10 executives think that customer loyalty has increased during that same time frame. The survey found that there's more than a 50-point gap between executive perceptions of customer loyalty and the reality of the customer experience. This podcast will exam some of the root causes for this disconnect, including the widely propagated myth that "Order to Cash" is a value stream. When collecting customer payment is perceived as a customer value, it corrupts everything from the culture of the organization to the software that implements this false and unrealistic premise. Customers are unhappy. It's time to face reality and invest in ways to shift towards a customer experience that prioritizes how to maximize customer value at every touchpoint.

In this episode, William Ulrich and Charles Bowman outline the "cognitive vision", something that appears to be lacking as organizations struggle to articulate a strategic direction on AI, even as they spend millions of dollars annually pursuing its benefits. The episode charts a path forward that defines the role of cognitive computing in streamlining strategy execution while concurrently making progress towards the cognitive operating environment. The discussion provides examples of cognitive operating model focal points, common practices to avoid, and a streamlined path towards deploying a digital twin.