Digital Transformation with Rameshwar Balanagu: What It Actually Is and How Does Process Mining Help?

- Mining your business podcast is back. - Yes, the show all about process mining data science and advanced business analytics is here to deliver yet another episode to you dear listeners. I'm joined yet again by my dear friend and colleague, Jakub, how's it going? - It's going fantastic Patrick, thanks. - Joining us today is Ramachwaya Balanago to tell us all about enterprise architecture. What it is, how process mining fits into the picture and why enterprise architecture is in its golden age. Let's do it. (upbeat music) - Hello again and usually it's Patrick asking me how am I doing? So today I'm just gonna do it the other way around and I'm gonna ask my dear co-host Patrick, Patrick, how are you? - Well, 60 episodes in and finally you ask me. Now Jakub, I'm doing fantastic. Summer's here, I'm in a great mood. - Nice, nice. I'm also in a great mood for two reasons. Well, first of all, I just came back last week from Amsterdam, so it's world two, which was very entertaining, metal lot of familiar faces, also guests of our podcasts. I talked to Timo there, I talked to Diedrich and a few others, which was always nice. It was interesting to see that there was this competition between the guests who had the most views and the most listened. I'm pretty sure that today's guests might have something to say about that. But, you know, two reasons I'm also feeling great is not only the Amsterdam tour, but it's also five years since I've been at this job. So it's a little bit of a milestone for me. And yeah, in my personal, you know, there's this brand about personal finds. I also sold 5,000 books, so it's an amazing feat for me too. So I had to, I had to remember here a bit. - Oh, congratulations, Jakub. - Thank you, thank you, Patrick. But that being said, let's actually get to our honored guest today. And the guest is Rameshwar Balangu. Rameshwar welcome to our show. - Hey, Jakub and Patrick, thank you for inviting me. It's an honor to always have a conversation with you guys and even more excited to be on your podcast. - It's actually great. And we were actually pointed out to you by our previous guest, Pete, from SAP Signável. So if he is listening to the podcast, thank you for that. I'm very happy that we got connected like this. And Rameshwar, what we always like to begin with is a little introduction of our guests. So Rameshwar, on your LinkedIn profile, what it says that you have quite an interesting career, you know, working a solution architect at a head of digital strategy at Avaya. You also worked in fourth technology council as an official member of this council. And I'm actually interested. What is it that you currently do? - Well, as the LinkedIn profile says, so first of all, thanks, Jakub. I have been into architecture for almost a long time and enterprise architecture has always been a passion for me. And I always believe in enterprise automation, which has been evolving from one technology to other to other to other, but you'll be rather surprised. The legacy debt still continues. And we also have modern debt that will come back to architecture later. On the foes, I keep blogging articles so that it helps to connect people like minded people. And you get to speak and talk to a lot of people, I've made a lot of friends. In fact, a couple of them, I have foes itself. So it's all about sharing and connecting with people and getting knowledge, making ourselves better. - Right, so what we actually want to understand a little bit and we've had super interesting people here before in different positions going from data analysis. We've had a process focused or process owners. We've had consultants here. I don't think we had here so far, a chief digital officer who you worked as a chief or head of digital strategy at Avaya before. And I'm very interested on, what does this job actually entitle? - In simple word, we help define the North Star for an enterprise, help you. So basically, the vision is where do you want to go? The mission is how do you want to go? And what are your goals? Very simple, that's what. It's all about, if you're in the first floor, do you want to go to fifth floor? If you want to go to fifth floor, how do you go by? You need a blueprint. You need steps or a elevator or you need board and you need floor by floor. So that's what enterprise architecture is all about the blueprinting and laying steps to get there, get to your North Star. - Is that difficult to envision with all the possible tools and things that you could possibly implement out there? Is it difficult to find the right strategy? - Strategy is always evolving based on the external environment and internal environment. It is, if I say it's easy, well, that's a slam dunk lie. If I say you had the fangs, leave the fangs, but COVID has shown how people have done transformation. It was never possible to have a remote, especially with government companies, but then you got it straight on the process. Again, it's not, I'll be constantly repeating. I believe in enterprise automation. I know there's a lot of hype in certain sectors of automation. It's all about how you're improving value to your customer, improving the customer journey. That's what companies enterprise automation has to be and is all about. - Now, I mean, you mentioned COVID and I think this was quite interesting for a lot of us to witness is that a lot of the hassle and the actual roadblocks that you had in other processes, I'm thinking of like local government type of things where they said you can't email us in all these things and all of a sudden COVID comes around and all of a sudden all these things start happening, right? That enable us to work more remotely and faster and more efficiently in a very, very short amount of time. And from you with such an experience, like how was that for you? Like what was the most starking trend that you saw through COVID? - So one thing is we've always been mostly remote. So there was nothing because we were a telecom company. So it was there. But many companies suddenly started implementing good security norms, good protocols. You know, even the processes, actually without process there's nothing. You know, what do we do to get people together? What do we do to make people efficient and how do we make efficient and how can we secure? I've seen companies, big companies, we're actually because people were so used to the physical presence when they moved online every Friday, they were family meetings just for people to get connected because one other thing that happened with remote was people were getting very much disconnected. So, you know, we all talk of empathy and that's something enterprise architecture always talks is empathy. You know, we use this word in design thinking as well. So when you have this remote, suddenly switched off, you want people to still feel connected. So the whole goal is, you know, how do people stay connected? How do they feel safe? In fact, what I do believe is that was the time they start showing your family's as well. So it's all about bringing that connected experience back because I connected, you know, we always say customer first. There are companies that said employee first. Companies, in fact, now you've made me force and tell me what Southwest Airlines is. You know, there's a big statement what they say is, you know, you take care of your employees, employees take care of your internal stakeholders, internal stakeholders, we'll take care of external stakeholders. That's such a profound statement that have hardly seen, you know, on what your vision mission and goals are. - Mm-hmm. I really like that you're mentioning this vision and goals of the company and basically, what I've also read in a lot of interesting books is how this then unfolds into the whole way of how you are implementing things or what you are even implementing. You mentioned an interesting term here, which I want to, you know, stay with for a little bit. And that term is enterprise architecture. Could you please explain to us what enterprise and architecture is for you? - So, basically the two things, architecture and enterprise. An enterprise means the entire company. When I mean the entire company, you have to tell the stakeholders, external stakeholders, internal stakeholders. Internal means executives, mid-management, even the low-level staff. In fact, I even go to the extent that everybody is your internal stakeholder. There are a few companies that kind of talk it. So now that we've covered enterprise and architecture, you want to define systems. You want to define business process. You want data, security, that touches your enterprise, both internal and external stakeholders. It's, you know, very simple, you know, people have multiple ways, but how are you architecting your enterprise for today, tomorrow and day after? - Right, so it's like a, I'm thinking of like a, specific systems for specific parts of the business that cover all the needs of all the stakeholders that you're talking about, right? - Yeah, basically we start with what we call as capabilities and value chains. So which capability serves which business customer? Or, you know, if there's a marketing, what kind of capabilities do they have? Lead management, territory management, build entries in sales, but then in marketing, it's campaign management, lead management, prospecting, probably some level, they handshake with sales as well. So we start with something called a capability because that is what business understands. You really, so if I take Jakob or, you know, Jakob is a data scientist. So his capability is data scientist and obviously there are a few more things. So I get to know what capabilities Jakob or Patrick has. Very similar is a enterprise. When enterprise architecture starts, once we get the business motivation, which is the vision mission and values, the first thing we start is, okay, there are these stakeholders or users, our line of business, everybody has different language. What do they have capable of? What is the strength? What is foundational? Like security and data are very foundational in nature. So we kind of start from there and then go further down into things like process systems. Yeah, Patrick. - So I was thinking me, because like when I'm talking about, or when we're talking about enterprise architecture, I'm always thinking about all these gigantic systems in large corporations, specifically all the legacy ones that have been running for 30 and 40 years. Now can you with your experience, tell us a little bit about like what a life cycle of like one of these systems is because for me, a rollout of a new system in this enterprise architecture sounds incredibly difficult, but what I've also seen is that the getting rid of a legacy system sounds way more complex. So maybe that's just my impression, but can you tell me a little bit how about that? - I'd also add one more thing. Modern systems are what something called modern desktop. So it's not like this. So first of all, it's a misnomer on people call it a legacy system. Legacy system is in our mind comes to mainframe. Do you know some of the world's largest banks even run on mainframes? Do you know that some of the stable and the most fastest transactions don't run on regular databases that actually run on mainframes? So first thing is what people need to understand is legacy debt is not mainframe. A legacy debt is where things, yes, things have become complicated. They become complicated because it's been aging. - Mm-hmm. - An aging, however, is not just the criteria because like I said, a mainframe, if it's 30 years and most of the ATMs, now I'm not sure in Europe, but in US, ATMs still use mainframes. And without an ATM, we won't get money. So is it a legacy? (laughs) So I don't know, I'll leave that. The thing is how less and how frequently we are using and the cost of supporting is what I call it. Now, yes, there is challenges because the legacy architectures are monolithic architectures. Now, we live in a modern ultra-responsive environment so we need to move there. So these transformations, and by the way, that is still digital transformation because the question that you have to ask is, why are you transforming your legacy architecture? Because it's no longer suited for your modern times. My modern time might not be modern time for market. So what I've installed today, and thanks to Generative AI, the technology that we've built in 2010 are also legacy. So I'm just telling you, the legacy is a context based on the era we are passing. And R era, if I see what Satyana the other said, we are moved from the cycle era to the internet 1.0 after Generative AI has come. This Generative AI and this Gen Y Gen Alpha are just unleashing innovation that even the 2020 is also a legacy for them. So long story short, we need to move into something called a composable state. And in order to do that, it is a big transformation project, but it's inevitable. If we don't embrace, somebody else will wipe us out. We will become the dinosaurs of the modern era. Now, I saw somebody post something recently where somebody, a very young person, got a job as a programmer and he learned cobalt, very old programming language. And he got a code base that his mother had written 30 years ago. And that's how old some of this code can get. And can you explain to us a little bit about if these are legacy systems, and they're there for a reason, because they are, like you said, they still run a lot of R, the things that we're currently relying on. And what is the danger of keeping these systems around? - See, first thing is the cost. Second thing is security. That's the biggest problem. The code base, so in the past, I think even in 2000, let's admit it, security was always at the back of a company. Security never had the limelight that it used to get. Now, it's security first, because it's reputation, it's take and everything. So, if you have cobalt code, you know, or even the old code that you have written, it was develop test the functionality but never look for security. Now, there's a zero-day trust. Now, I'm not going to preach about what zero-day trust is, but anything, everything can be breased and nobody can be trusted. So if the code was not made good enough, even though it was good enough, by now, it would have been hacked. I think somebody would have just thrown the code into chart or chat with your Googlebot and said, "Show me the vulnerability." Boom, it shows. And I can just use those exploitations. So, it's all about, again, the security, the vulnerability is the cost that can actually affect the brand of the company. So, people don't want to leave the holes open. In spite of these, because it's a zero-trust, there's always going to be a breach. And what is that? I don't know if you've seen your talking of legacy, cobalt, two weeks or three weeks back, somebody said they hacked chat GPT to show the results in such a way. So, in generative AI, we use the word hallucination. In security, we call them as hacks, "Alvaryl-British." So, what is the use of it? And this is the big problem that we're having. So, it's not cobalt. It's even the modern tech that's having a problem. Wow. Now, Rameshwar, what Patrick is actually trying to get into here is also another big buzzword, which is digital transformation. Because if you have some sort of legacy system and you at a specific point of time decide, this is too old, this is too close to keep up, this is security issue for us, we need to upgrade. And again, I will ask you about how do you see a digital transformation because actually naming it buzzword actually comes from you when we first had a little exchange before the recording of this. And you said that there is a lot of things that actually go into digital transformation. So, spearheading the enterprise architecture, what do you see behind a digital transformation? So, many people have many things, but I'll tell you first, to me, I'll tell you why it is a digital transformation. The first thing is about improving customer experience, improving stakeholder experience. When I mean stakeholder, it's external, internal, adapting to the business needs of the modern world, making sure your security and compliance are on picture, making sure your vendors are compliant, your vendors, meaning both your internal vendors and that. Now, you might ask me, 'Ramesh, what has that got to do with transformation?' Go and talk to your procurement. They are so out of date, when you have hundreds of softwares and thanks to SaaS-based systems, they don't even have a clue. So, they are searching for the legal contracts, or we can use automation. But do you need, again, my simple point is, unless you touch your external and internal stakeholders, you're not doing digital transformation. You're doing bits and pieces. So, again, it's a journey, not a destination, in my view. You are in a continuous journey of improving your experience of your stakeholders. And in order to do that, you have to go like, again, on what your objectives are, your portfolio management, your strategic management, your technology, your data, your security and compliance, and off-late, the word that has not been there, but now it's coming is, you've got to include sustainability as a part of digital transformation. So, that's why digital transformation is a journey, but not a destination. Mm-hmm. Who is even the person in charge of these things? So, I guess it's also the person who's in charge of the enterprise architecture, who then basically builds up a team around a specific topic, specific maybe issue from also this customer experience point of view, that you are trying to improve. An example would be if you have an efficient process, procurement process, which is, you know, the customer is probably your stakeholders at the company. You are processing payments, like whatever. So, then an enterprise architecture, if you are following this organizational hierarchy, should come up or should be consulted, and you decide on how to process or how to improve these things, correct? Yes. The key to all of these is baselining. You know, traditionally since we're focused on that, we used to do something called BPM. Of course, there are different teams. People who come from architecture, we believe that BPM is the core, but then one of the component of that is process discovery. So, unless you know there's something called measure, what matters by John Doerr, I'm sure you would have heard about that. So, if you don't know what you don't know, then what are you transforming? So, one other thing that we do is always baselining, and thanks Jacob, why do we do baselining? To know where we are from a business process, we also measure something in the business metrics, because why are you transforming? Let's say to improve, have a better procurement or faster closing. Well, I need to know what is my current rate, and what I'm applying to improve, and where do I improve? And that's where the business process comes into picture. So, we do a baselining of your process system's data metrics, and then we say, this is where we need to go. Again, companies like to use OKRs. I'm a big SAP guy. SAP uses value drivers, very similar to OKRs. So, this is where we want to go, and how do we go from here? So, the journey before you do a digital transformation is understanding where you are with your business process. Yeah. What are some of the-- before you get going on the digital transformation, right, that you said there's a bunch of discovery. What is a hallmark, or what is like some indicator that you can use to say, OK, I think we're ready. We have everything that we need. Now it's time to actually put this into action. OK, it's a long question, but I'll-- There is never ready thing, honestly. There's just confidence. You can't use blind confidence. And like I said, measure what matters. So, you know, the way-- and I'm actually going to-- I'm particularly say that you would have heard that EA is known as an ivory tower. I don't know if you-- ivory tower, which means we are only seen at the strategy level, and then we are only seen at the-- what we call as the governance, and then EA is not seen. But thanks to the last five years, where I could proudly and vehemently say that EA is at the cusp of driving things. So, when I mean by that, and what happened, suddenly, what happened, and why things are so better for an EA? We have technologies that can spearhead us to baseline faster. The biggest problem in the transformation is baselining and understanding where what your systems are. When you talk about it, we'll come back to step-by-step in a baseline. In process, in what you call it, in BPM world, we used to have something called process discovery. But, of course, people-- so, traditionally, a process discovery was, I used to set up a meeting with Jakob and Patrick. And you guys were super busy. And we used to do a process discovery. Now, there are two problems with it. You never had time. And by the time-- actually, three problems. And by the time you told what's in your brain, I documented it, and I gave it back to the rest of the world. The process has changed so much. The process has changed so much because people have changed. The technologies have changed. And many things have changed. Even the data has changed. And nobody knows that. So, if you asked many of the companies even today, I can vouch it. Where is the business process? It's over here. This is here. And just FYI, Rameshwar is pointing to his head. So, you'll be surprised that even to this day, I'm not talking small companies, even multi-billion dollar companies tell my process. Now, how on earth can you start a transformation? So, what you do is you look at the problems. So, what we do is we kind of assume a lot of things and then start a journey, which is the transformation. I last couple of years, I would say, thanks to vendor last, he's the hero, the godfather process, why me? Everybody went to Kursara, including me. So, there's no difference. And suddenly, what we found is, after I did the process of mining course and I did it on December 31st, 2017 in Kursara, after I graduated, I mean, after the Kursara course, I was starting scratching holy grail. This is exactly what I need because two things, through process mining, first of all, still starts with process discovery. It's a tool or a system helping accelerate your process discovery because I could go dig into the system, understand the business process. And when we did our first process mining, traditionally, I used to always set up stakeholder meeting and try to argue with them or document them. Here, we extracted a business process and we put it on the table and saying, guys, this is where you are. By the way, your systems are the systems, you're not compliant and this is what is happening, your average time, what not. So, for them, instead of challenging IT, they said holy shit, this is not to me. And that was music to me because fast forward, process mining is integral to me. Now, once I got process mining, we actually did something called value stream metrics, which is basically, how long a project takes to deliver, you know, deliver and it develops in a modern world. If we talk of value chain, a value chain is something that we deliver value to a customer. A value stream is how we deliver value to our projects, internally. How long does the project take? Where are the problems? Is it in the requirement phase? How long is it taking for the deployment? What is the velocity of that? So, when I start looking into these, you know, I get to know what is causing a pain to deliver a journey and then there is a cost. So, suddenly, now through process mining, through value stream and through cost, I'm actually having deep insights without even going into stakeholders. So, what we are doing is we're using these kind of tools. Again, there are various tools. So, we take all of these, you know, by the way, guys, you want to do a transformation. So, we're not going to do the entire world. There is possible, we can do it. It's a very simple question. If companies have been transforming, you know, a very simple blunt and brutal question to everyone. Why did we need RPA? The fact is, we could not do transformation. We could not modernize our systems. We could not modernize our process. We brought RPA. I know people will shoot me down the gun, but being an enterprise architect, I will tell, because we had inefficient process, inefficient systems. When Gartner said, "Buy model way" is the way to go, the buy model, like it was a hair and turtle classic example, the hair and turtle got so much separated, and we couldn't put in microservices, so then we put in RPA. And now we are saying everything together. So, that's why for me, everything is enterprise automation. - Right, right. I have actually a lot of questions on the various bullets that you mentioned here. First one would be, and you sort of already answered it, but do you then believe that, you know, if you are approaching the process owner, owners, the business stakeholders, that sometimes when you tell them your process is broken, they will tell you, "No, it's not true. Everything runs as it should, because I have here my number in the Power BI report." And it says, "Exactly what I want to see." Would them, the process mining approach, so actually digging the processes and pointing to these inefficiencies, be a way on how to motivate them to actually think about or even, you know, take this idea that really their processes are broken. - So, one other thing is, like any new technology or anything, they will be cultural resistance. - Yeah. - So, like you, Zarya, I hope, you know, hey, our process has died. I don't know if we don't trust your technology. That's very likelihood. What will happen is, again, having the stakeholder confidence. And this is where the concept of empathy comes in. If you bring the stakeholder into the gen, now there are two things. The way we have done this, in our case, process mining was strictly done by EA team before we went to the stakeholders. But what we did talk about is, hey, you know what, we have a tool and we had actually two foot approach. Everybody knows BPM, but nobody knows how to do it. You laugh at it, it's funny. Because BPM, to many people, is like drawing in a diagram in a visual. That's what it is. But BPM has standard notations and connotations, especially BPM 2.0. So, what we found is, okay, and this is what I'm talking about right off my bat. Like, oh, yeah, we do BPM, we do it in visual. We have the gateways, and we look at the business process, it breaks your head. It just breaks your head. No simulates, no start, no activity. It's just a sequence of flows. So, to them, that's BPM. That's what it is. It's a process flow or a BPM or not. So, we had, actually, we found in any group, there are these people who are always eager for technology or for doing change, and there are people who are like, okay, and then people who are receiving it. We've always identified people who are willing to participate with us. So, we've actually not brought the entire team. We bought these one or two people from each line of business and said, guys, we did some startling discovery. What we want to do is, we don't want to discuss with the world, we want to discuss with you. Because by discussing with you, A, we get to know the systems and the business knowledge, B, is you could be a champion for that line of business. So, what process mining is, it starts bringing jewels from your data, from your business process. So, when you have the stakeholder with you in your journey, only one or two stakeholders, because if you bring everyone, yeah, you're not going to move. - I had a question and did it also ever work the other way around that the business owners would do their process mining and then actually approach to you and tell you, oh, Ramesh, where our enterprise architecture is broken because here we see an efficiency, and we need you to fix it. - Yes, so once we've passed the initial phase, see, once they've adopted it and embraced the journey of process mining, they've started loving it. So, in our case, the teams that were doing process mining were part of the E18. So, many times, and this is where I say that there is this intelligent automation that has hijacked and said process mining belongs to us. Well, process mining is a tool, part of process discovery, which is part of BPM. And in my view, it is always part of the core of business architecture. And the reason why we need that is, you might not understand end-to-end of the business process, end-to-end of the systems, you're only looking at certain parts. So, in our case, we have driven this automation center of excellence and even BPM center of excellence. And process mining was always part of my journey. So, I'll actually add a little bit more to it. Now, what happens is, by accelerating the process mining journey, you're actually building business processes better and faster. And then what happens is, remember at the very beginning, I talked about business capability. Say I'm marketing, like Jakob, you talked of process to pay, or pre-cute to pay. What do we try to hire? By having the business process, which are living and breathing, we are able to connect to the business capabilities. And when you connect the capabilities to a business process, so if you take the purchasing department, the purchasing has various capabilities, like procuring it. So, we are telling the purchasing team, you have 14 business process, out of which 90% are non-compliant. So, business looks at a capability in a business process. So, this is why I said the last five years, for enterprise architecture, have been the golden era. We have tools like process mining, where if the business is taking time, take your time, that's great, we love you. But we have all these tools that can go in, these are in business systems that can roll up from an ELA level and say, you to support your line of business, say purchasing, you have 140 business process, 27 systems, and it cost me $50, $500,000. In the past, it used to take me forever, and now I have all this data, and then like suddenly, it becomes a very different discussion with them. And that's why I say, ELA is now with the golden era to spearhead transformation. Now, what I want to ask is that, once you start doing this practice, then I don't want to go into root cause analysis because that's a whole different topic. What I want to get is into actually the solution mode, because that's something which I see that, if you are in charge of the overall enterprise architecture, you play a major role. What I assume is happening is that suddenly, your pipeline starts, your pipeline of work of projects is start to swollen, so it's getting bigger, more problems are occurring, some are people problem, but a lot of them are also maybe a machine problem, a processes problem. How do you then, let's say, prioritize different, or differentiate on what you want to work on, or even decide whether it's worth fixing something, or just start completely over? - So, transformation from a CIO perspective, I'll come top down and bottom up. So the good thing is you gain momentum, and then you're doing more and more, you're excited. Basically, there is this, in addition to the E18, there is a strategic portfolio management team. Okay, we're changing the topic. So, you could look like, if you just take it a process mining level, there is a tactical step. A tactical step is in process mining, we're not going into the details, but you have all the variance, you have the impact analysis saying, you test this, you test this, this is the maximum. You can start doing that tactical, but at a strategic level, now that you've found that your processes are so inefficient, you have two things to do. When you mean improve the process, you probably have too many systems, or your business process needs to be completely redefined. So, from an architecture, what we do is, in enterprise architecture, there are actually four domains, but I will actually add six to two more. In enterprise architecture, we have business architecture, a data architecture, applications, which is the systems and technology, which is the backbone of it. Then, there is a security and sustainability to it. Now, why am I talking all of this is, traditionally, the business architecture was responsible for the business process. If the business process was tactical in nature, EA team will say, you know what, go just fix it, because there's not much to do. But if it's impacting, like I said, marketing sales, finance, if it needs a total redraw, then the business architecture actually creates a project as part of the journey. All these projects are managed as a part of strategic portfolio management. There are some tools called portfolio management or whatnot. Now, because why do you have to do that? Because once an architecture team has identified, this is a project or a program by itself, you will start tracking the deliverables. So, all these improvements, which could include even the process improvement. See, so basically, it's all about the process is telling, it is a bad customer experience or a bad, let's say, I'm giving examples that are there. We've seen purchasing, sometimes go from 45 days to almost 360 days for various reasons. So, we wanted to identify, why does it take so long? Because it's not of $2 billion or something like that. It is because of the statutory laws, especially in South America, where you have to do multiple invoicing at what not. So, then we had identified and created any project by itself. So, what I'm trying to say is, there is a tactical and a strategic one. So, the tacticals, you don't need a project, it becomes a part of your ongoing ops and support. Now, I was always wondering, if you were speaking about the business and process layer than technology and all these things that kind of interlink, is it then part of the strategy for enterprise architecture to identify, okay, is this a application problem? Is this a technology problem? Is this a business? Like, which is it all of them? And then, does that factor into how you go about tackling that specific process? You're right. So, the EAT actually meets and we have these domain experts of business, data application technology. And when a problem is brought, we look at it, we piecemeal it and say, which problem is it? It's all of the above or one of the above. If it's all of the above, then that itself becomes a strategic one. But if it's one of the above, that could be, I'll tell you an example. So, predictive analytics, which we all love to talk about from a process mining. Whose problem is it? It's a business data application technology. It's all of the above. Otherwise, you're not going to get it, period. And why do we have to do predictive? Very simple, you want to get a better outcome. In fact, process mining, which is, I call it, the descriptive analytics. And when combined with predictive, the power of processes is even more better. So, when you have to take this initiative, you need all of the above. You need proper data warehousing. You need proper data lake. You need business process. So, you need business architecture team to make sure what business processes are sending, what data. And the data and the application technology team are making sure, do we have the tax tax? Are we ready to demand? So, it's all about case to case, where either all the domains or domain-by-domain, we take it into picture. How do you even prioritize? Because it sounds like a lot of problem on the run roof. Like I said, one thing is, if you all remember, there's something called NPV and IRR. You remember that? I don't know. So, net present value and internal rate of returns. We don't have much. These are basic math, but so basically, why are we talking? What is that internal rate of return from a project? What is that the customer gets? What does the company get? So, when you take these projects, you always want to see the projects that have higher internal rate of return and are giving more benefit. Sometimes, take this case of security and compliance. They are not going to be positive, but if you don't do them, what's going to happen? Your file lawsuits, you'll have breach, you'll have lack of trust. So, anything related to security and compliance, say, for example, a process compliance. So, our process mining actually tells you, whether you're compliant or not. Now, the compliance, what process mining tells you is from a business process standpoint. But then, if there's a compliance aspect to it, like a legal or a government compliance, if you can start identifying that, you have no option but to take the project. And that project actually becomes a priority. I have many examples where you had to forcefully do the process and document it. Take the example of socks. No better example than that socks are PCI. So, you want to make sure your process and your systems are compliant. That is a project that cannot have a positive cash flow or anything. You better do that otherwise the government should know. I had one more question and that would be especially if you introduce something new. And it can be fixed, it can be new technology. Is it sometimes, or does it happen? Is it maybe prone to these occurrences that you might create more issues than actually fixing some? So, you introduce something new and you figure out that it's a huge mess. And I've heard about examples. I mean, we all hear of them when companies are developing new products, new technologies. But maybe sometimes, even introducing new ERPs, it consumes a lot of money, a lot of effort, a lot of overhead. Is it even maybe worth saying, you know, catch your losses and move on with something else? Or how does it even work? ERP is a typical paradox. It's a double toothed devil without that you can't live. But you also know that modernization causes it's a pain in the butt. But again, I repeat it. Thanks to the like-minus of Pros-Minus process. Everything that you've studied, Jacob, is apt and still a problem, because especially moving to the cloud or modernization. So, the thing is, we all are kind of pretty old. We said, you know, this is ERP 1.0 or 2.0. What we said is, before we implement ERP, we should do something called BPR. Everybody forgot about it. Business process is re-engineering. I see Patrick already talking about the reason why they said is, okay, why do we need ERP? A seamless way end to end from hiring to firing. A seamless way to place an order to see your inventory and to ship it and to finance it. A seamless way to purchase your procurement and invest it to your partner. It's a seamless way for a company to manage. In order to do that, companies need to do something called business process re-engineering, which is, make sure the process are efficient. What we did, we wrote a message to the vendors, and we customized the hell out of ERP. The hell out of ERP, 99% of the companies in the world. Of course, now we are moving to SaaS. There's a big journey to be Greenfield, which is I dare that. But on-prem ERP solutions, who are customized to the hell of it. Migrating them is a journey. So when they say the transformation is a pain, it is a pain because the modern systems don't relate to this PPR, and when I mean business process re-engineering to the customer state of it. And these guys don't want to let go of that. So it's a journey. Now, even the cloud, if you want to go to the modern SaaS ERP solutions, they are telling you better adhere to this process otherwise. The companies for the last 30, 40, 50 years have been kind of stuck to the old process. So it's becoming expensive. Now, but I can still say, if you can pay slide in your metrics, your journey to the modernization is better. It is not 100%. Yes, modernizing, any ERP is very, very expensive. Projects are not out of time. Forget projects running out of time. Even the whole thing, yes, we are ready to migrate. Even that is running out of time. Because the assessment itself is taking so much time, because we've customized the a lot of it. Now, you mentioned before that the enterprise architecture has six layers. You saw six components of it. Yes. And one of those that you mentioned is sustainability. Now, I was really curious as to how you see the introduction of sustainability, or at least the bigger focus of sustainability lately in enterprise architecture. So one thing, enterprise architecture follows some standards called Togaf, which is the open group. Sustainability is still not embedded in their layers, but I have embedded in my layer because it's time that all of us have to be this. So, enterprise architects are actually in the right mode for sustainability. We are deviating a little bit, but when you talk of sustainability, we talk of scope one, scope two, scope three emissions. I'm sure you know that, right? And then for me and also the other listeners that don't know what that means, can you? So very simple. There are all these protocols on sustainability development goals. But scope one is what you're purchasing from outside, which is basically the power or the fuel water. And scope two is what are you producing inside that contributes to carbon? Okay, then scope three is what's your upstream and downstream, which is how are your partners when they engage with you? What kind of carbon they are producing? The problem that I have is this is only focused on carbon. We also should focus on water. You know, water is also being polluted at an alarming rate. So we need to focus on it. What enterprise architecture does and will do is simple. I said at the very early beginning, we kind of help you define your not-star and we guide how to go there. In order to go there, what we do is process simplification. You might be thinking how does process simplification actually help in sustainability? Well, if your process is pretty easy, you have less number of systems, less number of people to interact, which means you have less carbon footprint being used. Why on earth? Let's say you're on the cloud. You're not standing up a new virtual machine. So you have one less machine. The number of clicks on your computer are less or on the system. So you're using less power. So you are actually kind of helping in sustainability by doing process improvement and by improving it data. Now, standing up a technology that can help understand a customer. So thanks to intelligent automation, classic example, we were using so much of paper. Now, we can cut down on the paper because we had vision recognition capability. So by using vision recognition, you don't need a paper. You could just generate a PDF, scan the hell out of it, and get content thanks to gender to API. So again, now, if we talk of gender to AI, that's a divide that we can have later. But thanks to technology, where you can improve things and get better, which means you are reducing one small step towards carbon footprint. Now, what needs to happen is, how do we translate that into the carbon emissions that are being reduced? But again, I will thank the cloud today in Microsoft. I'm not sure it will be as Google. When you stand up any kind of infrastructure, they will tell you the carbon footprint. So as an enterprise architect, if we have 10 systems today, can we add it with eight systems? So then we can calculate what is the carbon footprint. So that's how I view that ES have a big role in focusing and helping the sustainability coal for the company. Now, if you talk, because we are mostly software companies, but when you talk to the physical companies, take your mic, you both have mics. So when you audit the mics, you will have received a big box, a plastic box, or a cardboard box with a lot of paper and styrofoam and whatnot. These styrofoam are non-recyclable materials. But perhaps they can start, instead of sending in this non-recyclable materials, they could actually send in a recyclable material where it's in paper, or it's something recyclable. So that's where the sustainability comes in. So it's all about improving and reducing carbon footprint, improving your business, but also reducing a carbon footprint. Rameshwar, what are some of the topics in the realm of enterprise architecture that are getting you excited and that you're looking forward to in the future? The first thing that we all know is "Generative AI". So I'm actually toggling between chat GPT and Google BOD for every time to see who's giving a better answer for me. What was the last thing you used it for? I wonder. You want to know what it is? Of course. So that was a question that I asked chat GPT and BOD is, why is it graph technology being used in process mining? What was the answer? Shall I read it? It's funny enough, chat GPT could give a right answer, but Google BOD gave a better answer. Because for the last, and you know the reason why I asked the folks in process mining, please don't get disappointed, process mining technology is an antiquated technology, when you use an XML architecture. And the reason why you use that is now I'll be short down. Yes, I understand it's the patronets, and because it's event-based architecture, so it makes sense why you're using it, but when you have huge, huge payloads, XML sucks. That's why if you're JSON, you have graph databases, and this is a conversation I've actually had with T. So the architectures are so much built in the process mining that we don't use graph technology, and we don't use JSON, we use XML. I think Patrick, at the very beginning, you said, what's the legacy, right? So what we're not doing, so I guess it. No, from as to our, I think we could go very much into the depth in almost every part of our discussion we've had today, and that already brings me a lot of ideas in my head to maybe some follow-up episode in the future. However, for today, we need to wrap it up, and my last question for you would be, where can people go and find you, talk to you, and so on? I am on LinkedIn, Yaku, and I'm a friend of several people, so you can just find me on LinkedIn. For the people, if there's anybody in Dallas, I live in Dallas, so more than happy to have a cup of coffee, but otherwise virtual. I used to, it's funny enough during COVID time, I used to travel between US, Middle East, and India, so often, that people used to make fun of me saying that COVID got scared of you. I've shut down travel, but I keep traveling between US, Middle East, Dubai, and India. So if there's anybody in India or Middle East, Dubai, primarily, and US, I'm happy to meet. I keep traveling quite a bit within US too. I just checked our stats of the podcast, and I think India is number three, and US is number four in terms of the listens of the podcast, so there might be a few people who might be reaching out to you in the future. Anyway, Rameshwar, thank you very, very much for coming to our podcast. It's been pleasure talking to you. Yeah, likewise, good talking to you, Yaku, and Patrick. And for the rest of you, dear listeners, thank you for being with us and for spending your valuable time listening to our show. We really, really appreciate it. If you like it, leave us a review on Apple podcasts or Spotify. We truly appreciate it. And if you have any questions whatsoever, you can write us an email on minding your business podcast at gmail.com or just reach out via LinkedIn. You know where to find us. Thank you very much for listening, and I'll be talking to you in two weeks time. Bye-bye. [Music]