BJ Biernatowski's Dynamic Path: Bridging Past Experiences with Future Innovations

Mark Smith: 0:14
Welcome to the co-pilot show where I interview Microsoft staff innovating with AI. I hope you will find this podcast educational and inspire you to do more with this great technology. Now let's get on with the show. Today's guest is from Seattle Washington in the US. Of course, he works at Microsoft as a Senior Operations Process Improvement Manager. Critically important, he successfully launched and supported cloud-based digital process automation platforms using agile methodologies. He's an advanced BPM practitioner. Bpm is Business Process Management, with 20 years of IT experience, 15 of which are spent implementing business process management solutions. You can find links to his bio and socials in the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, BJ.

BJ Biernatowski: 1:02
Hello Mark. Thanks so much for having me through your show.

Mark Smith: 1:06
Good to have you on. I think you've got some exciting stories that you can share with the listeners, which I'm keen to unpack with you Before we go there. I always like to know about food, family and fun. What do they mean to you? What do you do when you're not working?

BJ Biernatowski: 1:21
Absolutely Food, family and fun. I think I'm going to start with food. Just like a lot of other people who are lucky to be on your show, I would say that food is one of those activities that we do with people that matter to us. Right, it is both enjoyable, but it's also a way to spend time and make other people feel comfortable, and I'm a huge fan of teriyaki chicken. Teriyaki chicken is one of the Seattle staples. It's so hard to find good teriyaki chicken outside of Seattle, I'll tell you, and my fiance makes the best teriyaki chicken. We Seattle, I'll tell you, and my fiance makes the best teriyaki chicken. We have two teenage kids at home. They're food critics. They love it. They love it. They have a lot of teriyaki chicken and she makes top notch teriyaki chicken.

Mark Smith: 2:12
Nice. Have you tried it in Japan?

BJ Biernatowski: 2:14
No, I have not. I studied the history. Have you tried teriyaki it in Japan? No, I have not. I studied the history. Have you tried teriyaki chicken in Japan?

Mark Smith: 2:20
Yes, yes, yes, I mean teriyaki chicken is probably my favorite. Whenever I go into a Japanese restaurant, I tend to always that's my default go-to, so 100% with you there.

BJ Biernatowski: 2:31
Yep, and I'm a fan of fusion food. You know, fusion food, that is, food that is brought to the US by immigrants, people that bring their memories and the food from their homelands. They always seem to add a notch of their special secret sauce in America. That's why I think you know teriyaki chicken and pizza and pierogi from you know Polish community. They do taste better here, Nice, Nice.

Mark Smith: 2:57
I like it, I like it, I like it. So that's covered. You've got two kids with your partner and you're in Seattle, right? So what do you do? Do you do any outdoor activities, or are you a gamer, or what's the story there?

BJ Biernatowski: 3:08
No, I do like hanging out outdoors. I like to travel in my rooftop tent. That is one of my favorite activities.

Mark Smith: 3:15
Oh very activities.

BJ Biernatowski: 3:17
I load a rooftop tent on my car and like to travel to undiscovered places. I take my bike with me. I love mountain biking. I picked up mountain biking about three years ago and it's a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun, so being outdoors, cooking outdoors and just spending time outside it gives me a lot of joy. So, yeah, I truly enjoy that.

Mark Smith: 3:40
I love it. I love it, so tell us about your journey into Microsoft. How did you end up working for Microsoft?

BJ Biernatowski: 3:48
Yep, I love the question. I used to be an intern many, many years ago at the end of the 90s, so Microsoft gave me a chance while I was still in college to get a job. I worked there for about six. I worked for a company. For about six months I worked at Issaquah for the MS Sales Division. I was still under Bill Gates. Steve Ballmer was just about to take over the company, so that was how I first started working with Microsoft. After graduating, I didn't come back, though it took me about 20 years to come back with Microsoft. After graduating, I didn't come back, though it took me about 20 years to come back to Microsoft. They still kept my original employee name, which is kind of cool, so I have a four digit employee number and people notice that.

Mark Smith: 4:30
Wow, that's amazing. That's incredible because I do a lot of work for Microsoft. So you get a V-dash. That's incredible because I do a lot of work for Microsoft. So you get a V dash, you know, and with the V dash side of things, you get off boarded every 18 months and then you have a six month call off period. They call it and then you can come back on network. But each time I get issued a brand new ID, get brand new alias and, like I've been on network for almost 10 years now, so you can imagine how many ids I've had, because the way that virtual employee works is a yeah, a new active directory entry, to use the old phrase for intra. Each time I wish that I could have kept my original, because back then I got things like mark smith. It was was relevant, but now it's not a chance. I'm currently called Smith Mark as my V dash, as my alias.

BJ Biernatowski: 5:23
Got you.

Mark Smith: 5:24
Tell me about the Nordstrom story. This is how I first connected with you. I think you've got an exciting story to tell about Nordstrom, which you worked at right previous to Microsoft.

BJ Biernatowski: 5:33
That's correct. So Nordstrom is another Seattle headquartered company, one of those special companies here that a lot of people recognize great brand name. I was working for Nordstrom as an enterprise process architect and we were trying to create a vision for enterprise scale automation of our core processes. Enterprise scale automation of our core processes. Nordstrom was one of those special companies that truly invested into enterprise, business and process architecture. They've done a lot of fabulous work there. We had a team, we had culture, we had a lot of assets, we had people contributing to our repositories.

BJ Biernatowski: 6:17
But you know, like with a lot of similar efforts, right architecture only gets you so far and there's always the question of why are you doing it? You know strategy and process strategy and capabilities. Where's the value? And I got lucky. I got hired by a director who was leading it. He liked my experience with process automation Jay Olvey, very forward-looking leader and Jay said BJ, I'd like you to come back. I was working at Amazon at the time. I'd like you to come back and come to Nordstrom and help us evangelize a little bit of taking all of this work to the next step, which is starting an automation practice. And I thought, hmm, that's interesting. I think Jay had a very bold vision. He knew how to gain support within the executive team. So I said all right, let's give it a try.

BJ Biernatowski: 7:09
And for about two years we've been slowly starting to talk to a lot of teams at the company about their needs, about what automation could mean to them, what it was, how they're running a lot of their operations. And we're also looking at vendors in the ecosystem who offered what at that time was called BPMSs right, business Process Management Systems. And we went literally. I led the project. We went across the globe. I spoke to almost every vendor on the planet trying to define our critical needs, the whole set of use cases, and we were talking to these vendors, learning a lot about what they're all doing in this space.

BJ Biernatowski: 7:55
And after two years we shortlisted a couple. It wouldn't be surprised Some of the vendors who are on the top of the top list Microsoft wasn't on the list. Microsoft and Power Platform at that time were still kind of getting in the market. The story was a little bit fuzzy. We did talk to Microsoft, we talked to the Business Process Management Center of Excellence at Microsoft on how they're utilizing it and eventually Nortel ended up investing into a local company, k2. I'm not sure you're familiar with them.

Mark Smith: 8:23
Yeah, k2 from South Africa Came from Australia, right, mm-hmm? South Africa came from.

BJ Biernatowski: 8:28
Africa, south Africa, mm-hmm.

Mark Smith: 8:29
Yeah, okay, as far as getting it mixed up with Nintex. Nintex came from Aussie, didn't it?

BJ Biernatowski: 8:34
Well, you could be mixed up, because Nintex acquired K2 a few years after, so now they are part of the same company, right?

Mark Smith: 8:42
Yes, yes, yeah, there we go.

BJ Biernatowski: 8:43
So you know, we brought K2 and in the process we brought Azure as well, because K2 and Azure worked a lot better together. We're able to get you know the type of ROI that was critical, the type of ROI that was critical. I think the ROI story is important because we're looking at a lot of components from companies in the Pacific Northwest here iGraphics for process modeling, k2 for automation, microsoft for the cloud stack services and integrations, and because Nordstrom is a retailer, there's a lot of pressure on launching these types of efforts with the best ROI right. Some industry may have bigger margins, a little bit bigger budgets, but in retail it's all about volume. It's really the bar for ROI is pretty high. A lot of vendors couldn't meet it right. We launched K2. The program was pretty high. A lot of vendors couldn't meet it right. We launched K2. The program was pretty successful. I think we were able to grow our program to about 60 projects.

BJ Biernatowski: 9:44
And then Microsoft came back to us with the Power Platform story and it completely changed the ROI right. I mean, the Power Platform was getting more recognized. There are a couple of other product decisions that are made and it started to compete in the very same adoption space, which was white type of automation, right White type of transformations, and slowly but surely, microsoft Power Platform started to gain a lot more of the work that K2 was doing. So we graduated from you know what I would say Microsoft roots that were delivered through workflow workflow-ish company that grew from that space into now a much bigger platform right, and it happened in two years. I think that was the most exciting. We spent two years researching and ranking and talking to analysts, talking to customers, and in two years Microsoft made such a big stride into the market that it was simply mind-blowing. We could do and see things that Power Platform wasn't able to do two years ago.

BJ Biernatowski: 10:56
So, that was truly an eye-opener for me.

Mark Smith: 11:00
So when you say that, are you talking about Power, automate and or Logic Apps?

BJ Biernatowski: 11:06
That too, but it was Power Automate, Logic Apps, Power BI, the whole vision around the platform. Right yeah, that offers a lot more than just workflow automation. Right yeah, let's work for automation.

Mark Smith: 11:20
I mean one thing I've seen in recent times in that Nintex space is where forms and automation right form capture, with automation behind it. I'm seeing companies move away from that to Power Automate, power App type, form, app experience and then, of course, power BI for reporting elements on it. And I mean the Nintex tool is still a smooth looking tool.

Mark Smith: 11:43
And it's interesting you talk about BPM, because I first came across BPM in 2013 was when I was first I went to a company in Australia to work and they had a big BPM-esque business that consulted for those type of systems and I'd never come across it before, you know, and just the power of it being, I feel it's a level above automation, because it's automation but potentially over a long time horizon right, we in banking you could be talking about a 25 amortized loan over a long period of time which is going to have fluctuating variable rates on that, and so the automation wasn't just triggered and then runs to a logical end it could get adjusted.

Mark Smith: 12:24
And so I've always seen BPM as much more advanced than just simple automation, and so it's interesting that your lens there, because I've always felt, and you know, when Steven Siciliano was enrolled with Power Automate, one of my questions to him was when are you going to really own that BPM type space? And he still felt then and this would have been two years ago, maybe, that they hadn't achieved that yet that you could classify it as a BPM tool, the combination, but obviously you're using it at Nordstrom as such.

BJ Biernatowski: 12:59
We started to, we started to use it and we started to use it for that very purpose. And, of course, there's always competition. You have competition from Service now. So you have competition because there's a lot of different platforms, right. But the true appeal of Power Platform was and before that, k2, we were trying to connect our investment into process automation with the self-service type of delivery and then reduce the backlog of engineering teams and empower these citizen developers to say hey, I've got a problem, I don't want to talk to anyone, I have a short timeline. I want to solve a very small but very painful problem and then expand this horizon to 60, 600, 6,000 of those and create an architecture of citizen developer-developed applications that connect into end-to-end processes. Right, that's how you get the ROI in my mind, so that's interesting.

Mark Smith: 14:08
Also, this concept of ROI in the BPM space. How did you calculate it? Or how did you perhaps not so much calculate but demonstrate the ROI of one tool over another?

BJ Biernatowski: 14:20
Yeah, that's a very good question. So there's a lot of golden standards, right? You have the Forrester standard. If you're a customer of Forrester, they'll give you the formula on how to calculate the value of your transformation.

Mark Smith: 14:33
Yeah.

BJ Biernatowski: 14:33
Well, it is at a very high level If you get into the implementation, if you get into the nitty-gritty projects, the fact that sometimes you have version 1, 2, 3 of a project, the fact that you're training people. You have to connect a lot of theory with the actual hands-down tactical implementation. Right, some companies are super skilled in this and they can offer. They have their own scaling factors, they have their own models and when they bring consultants, they can do it. But at Nordstrom, we're trying to come up with our own method that would connect what we knew the platform would be able to do based on how other customers were using it.

BJ Biernatowski: 15:18
You kind of need to embed that ROI in your own environment, knowing that it's going to scale. I mean it's going to adjust, it's going to adjust. You can't do it based on just six months because people are going to scale. I mean it's going to adjust, it's going to adjust. You can't do it based on just six months, because people are going to learn. You're going to get more value, more projects, right. So we had a best-case scenario, worst-case scenario and average spread and we used a lot of inputs from the field, but also inputs from these waves you get from Forrester, where they offer you, I would say, scaling factors into your model right, and then we would forecast that 12 to 18 months, right, 12 to 18 months, knowing that at each end of the project we would have to validate our business value. It's an art form, our business value, it's an art form.

Mark Smith: 16:35
Yeah, that's interesting In that art form. Did you have any formalities between comparing one to the other, or were you really relying on that third party data from your gardener, your forester and things like that?

BJ Biernatowski: 16:48
No, we were relying on our own data, using formulas from outside. Right, so you need to scale these formulas to your own environment, to your own teams, to their velocity, to how fast they're learning. Are they learning in the right way? Right, and at some point in time, I remember we had a third-party consultant coming in and saying well, you guys are saying the ROI is this. Let me take another look at it and maybe take a critical eye. Yeah, so if you're transparent about how things are getting calculated, you put it out there, you get enough scrutiny into your model. I think this is getting the BVA, or business value and ROI out of any transformation project. I think in my mind, it is like one of the most important things, right, because vendors can promise anything and everything. Yes, and the challenge is you bring a company like Appian or a company like Pegasystems or Tipco and they'll say, well, we were able to get the ROI of 460% here.

Mark Smith: 17:52
Yeah.

BJ Biernatowski: 17:53
Well, the question is how did you go about this? So there are different schools of thought. Our approach was we're going to try to learn from these best practices, but put our own people bring the people who knew the business area. Try to get after the innovation that was sitting, that was buried in business operations, usually on their front end, right. You have a lot of folks who there's any sort of engineering budget. They barely see it right.

Mark Smith: 18:25
Yeah.

BJ Biernatowski: 18:26
And then we came up with a service-based model. So you need to have a predictable method of supporting these folks right, all the way from. So we created like a citizen developer journey to say, how do you go from the concept of a project all the way to the goal line? Right, and we care about 12 different steps and at each point of the journey we would assist these folks to make sure that they're going in the repeated in the same direction right? Sometimes people start from different places in the project. Sometimes at some point in time, someone already has a POC, so you say I have to do a proof of concept, but sometimes you have to get it to the proof of concept.

BJ Biernatowski: 19:07
The important part was that we were using we call it a play model, so you would build a service play out of a portfolio of different services that were offered by our center of competency team right, and we would support these citizen developers through each stage of the journey, and that allowed us to collect data about where they were. It allowed us to manage the risk and it also allowed us to push them in the right direction as far as tools, guardrails or guidelines and any training they would need right, so it was a little bit different way of delivering solutions. We had to be engaged with them. We had a team of about seven people when we started, after our platform went live, and then I think we shrank to about five, but with five people who were able to support about 60 projects. Out of 60 projects, four of them were pretty sizable, so they grew.

Mark Smith: 20:06
So what was the outcome at the end of the day at NodeStream? What was the end results?

BJ Biernatowski: 20:10
I think we're able to prove the value of. There's different stories depending on where you look. If you look at connecting strategy with process, there's some stories about Nordstrom being able to use the value of process architecture to expand into Canada right, but that's just one of the angles of how do you get the benefit of all of the AP that's built. When you talk about pure automation right, there's a couple of examples where we are able to shorten the delivery cycle and go from historically probably would have taken six, seven months to two, and that provided the company with competitive advantage. It also provided the company with I think it also provided the company with, I think, a much cleaner and faster path to get to their business objective, right. If you can launch a solution that takes two months versus seven, you see how people are using it and you can go after the things that are waiting for you once the system goes live Much quicker.

BJ Biernatowski: 21:15
One of those scenarios would be Nordstrom was launching a store in New York. It was a big, big celebration for the whole company. We were trying to scramble, trying to create the infrastructure for some of the processes that were supporting the opening. That's where BPM and low-code came in and delivered on the value right. But you had to bring this again process, risk management techniques and then low-code and the right group of people to level set on it and say, okay, well, it's not going to be a seven-month project, we can meet that aggressive deadline, right.

Mark Smith: 21:57
Yeah, so good. Tell us about what you do now on Microsoft.

BJ Biernatowski: 22:02
I am a capability process owner. I support payments, payment operations for our incentives business part of finance. So I changed roles a little bit. I still tinker with processes from the inside. I own one of these processes and we're trying to improve it. We're trying to improve it. We are accountable for paying our partners for incentives globally. So I'm part of a group of people that pays these incentives. We have lots of processes powering these, lots of applications and lots of challenges, being a global operation right.

Mark Smith: 22:38
Yeah, yeah, I bet. So is this like ESIF incentives?

BJ Biernatowski: 22:41
ESIF is one of those correct ESIF retail incentives. You know there's a few others.

Mark Smith: 22:46
Yeah, of course, interesting. You mentioned BVA, business value assessment. Have you had much to do in that area? Because you know, inside Microsoft I've seen the BVA tools and I think they're one of the most powerful tools a seller has in their arsenal. Yet in the last couple of years I've noticed, I suppose, a drop off in them being used as much as what I thought they would, and I've always thought that when you can take some industry data and then a client's own data right and mesh them together and there's a beautiful power app that did this, it's almost like the data calculated, where you can offer the full calculations and so it can be audited, et cetera.

Mark Smith: 23:28
The results are pretty phenomenally positive. That would often come out of those, and so I'm just surprised that we're not seeing it used more and more, particularly now as we move into AI and companies. Their first result responses excuse me, what's the ROI on this? How do we calculate it? And of course, it's all new ground right. There's an element of people not knowing how do we account for potentially time saved inside an organization by an individual. One cto I heard say that you know if I can save my staff an hour a day and they're spending that hour more around the water cooler. Have I made anything as a company right? Is there any advantage to me as as an organization? That's one way to look at it, but I'm just wondering if you've done much thought around the ROI or business value that AI brings to an organization.

BJ Biernatowski: 24:26
I've done BBAs in the past myself, right. I used to be in consulting, so the BBA was one of those critical components of a project being pitched, sold, delivered right.

Mark Smith: 24:39
Yeah.

BJ Biernatowski: 24:40
Depending where you were in the journey. If you were on the poor delivery team and someone oversold the BBA, you always hated the account executive because you knew that it was a grind right.

BJ Biernatowski: 24:52
You had to come in and 14-hour days and everybody had to meet that BVA right. But I think the BVA and I've worked with teams and folks at Microsoft who specialize BVA is one of the consulting specializations. There's few people, I think, within Microsoft that know how to do it of the consulting specializations. There's few people, I think, within Microsoft that know how to do it. It was interesting for me, coming from different vendors' camps With that skill set. A lot of it is very similar right. What's unique to Microsoft is, I think, you can get the scale easily. So a lot of Microsoft implementations are bigger, so you get a lot more volume. Just like you said, there's some tools that were built to help with the BVA. My experience tells me that it is always about that one person whose word is on the line. And I come from a school of thought that if you missed the BVA and you over-promised it to your CTL or your stakeholder, it was you and they would never want to hire you again, right?

BJ Biernatowski: 25:52
So, going through this kind of a predictable method of collecting BVAs. I was asked by one of our directors here locally within finance to come up with a BVA and I offered them a timeline. I treated it like a project Three weeks, but not just effort duration. Three to four weeks. When you're doing a BVA, you collect pieces of information at different points in time and as you get deeper and deeper and you start getting into your solution architecture, the vision of the project, the vision changes. You know it is a bit of an art form. You need to get people on the same page about what it is that they want. Do they truly see that vision? And sometimes you build a proof of concept or a wireframe and then that creates additional discussion.

BJ Biernatowski: 26:38
Right, I usually cut my BVAs in kind of three points in time T-shirt sizing there was the second one and then budgetary guidance. Budgetary guidance with confidence about 80% confidence. They would allow you to go and get your funds and you build in about 20% of your technical contingency and you could deliver a project on it. Right, but it's for digital change projects. It's for projects, not for programs. If you're talking programs, you need more people, you need a tool to collect data. Right, you probably need one or two people talking to others and collecting your inputs from these apps. Then the scale adds another dimension, right, super critical part of any transfer. In my mind it is the most critical. If you can't break the BVA, the ROI of a transformation, what are we doing here? Right, I mean?

Mark Smith: 27:31
yeah, so valid we're into 2025. What excites you about the year ahead?

BJ Biernatowski: 27:37
oh, my goodness, 2025. Well, first of all, I'm going to be getting married 2025, so that's probably congratulations, thank you. Working have been working, lucky. They've been working on a book with two other co-authors Jim Steiner, former VP of Gartner. Very recognized in the space is Bignyat Mishak, who is part of an OMG. He's a senior process consultant from Box Systems in Europe. We're trying to put together a story about the value of process in digital change, digital transformation and the new AI world. Right.

Mark Smith: 28:14
Nice, nice.

BJ Biernatowski: 28:15
A lot of the old topics. They're still relevant. You know you're bringing AI into the mix, you're bringing different technologies. The space to automation will not slow down, right? The question is, what are you going to be building, right? Are you going to be building separate islands of automation that are powered by AI? Are you going to be building agents, autonomous agents that are now triggering processes that have no idea what each one of them is doing, right? How is that story going to unfold? And then this push to empower, empower, empower, empower people to do more with less right.

Mark Smith: 28:55
How does that work?

BJ Biernatowski: 28:56
So we decided to write a book and hopefully 2025 is going to be the year where we can come forward and talk a little about that new take on the process.

Mark Smith: 29:06
I love it. I love it. If you want to review, it'm happy to volunteer I appreciate it.

Mark Smith: 29:11
Yeah, I've reviewed a couple of books for various publishers in the space, so that would be a lot of fun. I think it's a much needed area of discourse that needs to happen, and there's a whole new generation of folks coming through that don't have that history, and I think that to reinterpret it with an ai lens is so critically important because there's still so many lessons that can be taught from that history. Thank you, bj. Thank you, it's been good having you on the podcast. I really appreciate it.

BJ Biernatowski: 29:40
It's been amazing. I appreciate the opportunity to share my thoughts and looking forward to our conversations about the book.

Mark Smith: 29:47
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host, Mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. Is there a guest you would like to see on the show from Microsoft? Please message me on LinkedIn and I'll see what I can do. Final question for you how will you create with Copilot today, Ka kite?